One of the most extraordinary books I have read in recent years is Just Enough: lessons in living green from traditional Japan by Azby Brown. Brown is director of the Konazawa Institute of Technologies Future Design Institute and has lived in Japan for the last 30 years. It is a beautiful analysis of the integrated, […]
Exactly a year ago today I wrote a piece on this blog called The day I closed my Amazon account. It set out why, and how, I had decided that Amazon was so at odds with my values that I was withdrawing my support for good. It turned out to be the most popular thing […]
Incredible!: Plant Veg, Grow a Revolution is the story of Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET), the food-growing project in Yorkshire which has inspired people around the world to look at their urban spaces in a very different way. In Todmorden you can pick sweet corn in front of the police station, salads up the High Street, […]
A guest post from Michael Thomas, Transition Network’s Support Co-ordinator. For the past 9 months we have been creating a new support framework which draws on the various resources that Transition Network has produced over recent years, experience gained from Transition Training and feedback from across the movement. We wanted to bring key information together, […]
Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins was the proud winner of a People Environment and Achievement (PEA) Award at the awards event on London’s South Bank last week. He was one of three winners in the Campaigner of the Year category, alongside: Cat Fletcher – I Love Freegle – Resource GoddessAjay Gupta – National Environmental Science Academy […]
I have sometimes been asked “if you had a prime time TV advertising slot to promote Transition, what would you put on it?” This is a good time to ask that, as our TV channels pour out relentless TV adverts in the run-up to that special time of year when the UK gets set to shell […]
In 2008, when I was researching my PhD looking at Transition Town Totnes, I went out to visit Douglas Matthews at his farmhouse near Staverton. Douglas was 99, and still slept in the bedroom he had been born in. He died a few months later having just reached the age of 100. He was still […]
It’s now 17 months since Transition Culture moved from its home at www.transitionnetwork.org to its new place on this website. We have introduced a number of changes, in particular the monthly themes, the monthly Transitioner’s Digest and the bigger editorial ‘think piece’ at the start of each month. As we reach the end of 2014, […]
Three Scottish Transition groups, Black Isle, Stirling and Linlithgow joined with 23 other organisations to call for a moratorium on unconventional gas extraction in Scotland. The letter, published in the The Herald Scotland, runs as follows: “We, an alliance of groups from Scottish communities directly or indirectly at risk from the unconventional gas extraction industry, […]
Reading a Naomi Klein book is always a deeply absorbing experience. In a sense, the sheer size of them means you have no choice other than to be absorbed (This Changes Everything runs to almost 600 pages). Her two previous masterworks, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine were mind-altering and life-changing for me. This Changes […]
Bath & West Community Energy just closed their third public share offer. It raised a remarkable amount of money, £1.6 million, to build the Wilmington Farm Solar Array. Coming on the heels of the recent West Solent Solar Co-operative (which included many members of Transition New Forest) share issue raising £2 million, it’s very impressive […]
You may have noticed that it is the 11th, and we still haven’t started a new theme yet, as has been our pattern for the past couple of years. October, for me, involved a huge amount of travel and time on trains. I went to St Andrews for the Transition Roadshow there, to Paris for […]
Back in December 2009 when a few Belper residents first met to talk about this new thing called the Transition Network, the community of Belper was already actively battling the mighty Tesco; they had bought the derelict Thornton’s site in the centre of the town, by the River Derwent, to build a superstore. We had […]
Our theme this month has been ‘Rethinking Real Estate’. It began with an editorial piece, Why I’m Proud to be a SWIMBY, which framed the month. It introduced a new term, SWIMBY (as in “Something Wonderful In My Back Yard”, as opposed to NIMBY), and outlined a ‘SWIMBY Manifesto’. It built on John Thackara’s question […]
One of my highlights at the recent Transition Roadshow at the University of St Andrews in Scotland was a workshop led by Angus Hardie, Director of the Scottish Community Alliance. He talked about the forthcoming Community Empowerment Bill. “I like the sound of that” I thought. The workshop proved fascinating, as did some of the […]
On the weekend of November 14-16, Transition Town Totnes will be holding the first Transition Film Festival. Some 20 screenings will be held, at the town’s Civic Hall and across the square at Bogan House. The films, drawn from around the world, feature a wide range of ground-breaking initiatives – around seeds (“Seeds of Justice”), resilience (“Easy […]
Ben Brangwyn (co-founder of Transition Network) recently returned from the German National Transition (Un)Konferenz. Here’s his write up. Good to see Transition alive and kicking (and dancing) over there in Deutschland. Back in June, Gerd Wessling, the startup guy for Transition in Germany asked for someone from Transition Network to participate in their (Un)Konferenz in […]
When Hay on Wye was threatened with a new supermarket in what appeared to be a cosy done deal between the local authority and a developer, a group of local people responded with a ‘Plan B For Hay’, bringing together architects, lawyers, designers and campaigners to create an alternative, viable, more popular scheme. I spoke […]
I’m just back from two days in and around the beautiful city of Bologna in Italy, participating in a series of events that felt like they generated some real traction around Transition. Italy finds itself at an interesting moment, a fork in the road. Its government is proposing a new bill to open the country […]
At the age of 17, I resolved never to use a particular phrase, which sadly, it seems to me, is once again increasingly common in everyday English usage. I can’t stand it. It’s a term the Global Warming Policy Foundation were quoted as using in a lamentable piece of climate activist-bashing in last weekend’s ‘Mail […]
Today’s guest post is from Amy Burnett, who is also happy to answer any Neighbourhood Plan related questions you may have (see below) … When some people hear the word “planning” it is not something that usually gets them very excited. Planning may conjure up images of dull technocrats, complicated maps and perhaps ugly remnants […]
All too often our experience of being consulted on proposed new developments is a few architects drawings in a church hall and our being asked to give some feedback. We are never then told what the community’s feedback was, the development then goes ahead pretty much as planned, and it all feels like a rather […]
It’s an all too common experience to plough on with doing Transition, from activity to activity, without pausing to reflect on or celebrate what we’ve achieved. It was delightful therefore to visit the New Forest this week, both to give a talk but also to see their ‘Live and Unleashed! New Forest Transition’ exhibition at […]
Instead of running an annual conference in 2014, Transition Network is running four Roadshows around the UK. The pilot took place in Lancaster in July, and St. Andrews in Scotland hosted the first Roadshow proper. The St Andrews event was hosted by Transition University of St. Andrews, who have been doing amazing work both within […]
Today’s guest post is from Fiona Ward: “About 18 months ago, I invited the women of the Transition Network staff and board to an evening meeting to begin to explore our experience of working in the Transition movement. We discovered that our reasons for wanting to get together and our perspectives on gender were many […]
Chepstow is a small Welsh town with a population of about 12,000. It is a border town located on the River Wye where it flows into the Severn Estuary. Although it does have some local industries it is now mainly a commuter town with motorway access to Bristol, Newport and Cardiff. Many people will know […]
As architects and developers plan new developments, they are certainly thinking about roads, parking spaces and footprints, but are they also thinking about productive plantings, the role of rooftop gardens and biodiversity? Almost certainly not. Having visited some great urban agriculture initiatives in the last couple of years, this feels a shame for two reasons. […]
It would be fair, I think, to say that Transition was slower to take off in France than in some other European countries, but it now feels well underway. This evolution has been greatly aided by the recent publication, by Editions du Seuile, of the French edition of The Power of Just Doing Stuff, entitled […]
One might well be forgiven for assuming that our current strategy for getting out of an economic crisis caused by an unsustainable housing bubble is to create an unsustainable housing bubble. But are we? And what is a housing bubble anyway? We asked Tony Greenham, who runs the financial reform programme at the New Economics Foundation […]
Naomi Klein is currently promoting her excellent new book This Changes Everything. As part of this, she recently did a ‘Guardian Live’ event, chaired by Owen Jones and streamed on the web. You can now watch the event in full below, it’s fantastic and well worth watching. In one question, “could you talk a bit […]
I had the great honour the other day of formally opening the UK’s first urban mushroom farm. City centres are full of unused office space, either due to lack of demand, or due to developers mothballing them for future development. What use might be found for them? And might a creative interpretation of the term […]
Darren Woodiwiss of Transition Market Harborough reports on the group’s attempts to influence development in their town, which have focused on the one remaining undeveloped site in the town… “Market Harborough is a picturesque market town situated in South Leicestershire nestled up against the Northamptonshire border. It is a relatively prosperous town on the Midland […]
Paul Chatterton is one of the founders of the Lilac Cohousing project in Leeds. BY day he works as a geographer at Leeds University. Lilac is a fascinating model for a new, more equitable and ecological approach to providing affordable housing. When we met Paul to learn more, we started by asking him what, in […]
You’re passing a field and you see a large hoarding bearing the words ‘New Homes Coming Soon’. What feelings do those words inspire? Delight to see ‘economic activity’ underway? Thrilled that ‘place-making’ is happening? Or a sense of despair, impotence and violation? As more and more such signs pop up around us, we’re giving space […]
Following our successful pilot in Lancaster, Transition Network is on the road, and the next stop is St Andrews, Scotland, October 10/11th, 2014. We’d love you to join us. In collaboration with Transition St Andrews, it will take place with Transition Network’s trademark, participatory conference style of workshops, Open Space, great hang outs, and engaging […]
“Hold a question in your mind and allow nature to answer it by simply listening with all your senses. Let it lead the way in this next step in your life”. Those were the instructions I was given, one sunny day in July in a protected natural woodland enclosure beside a river. I was to […]
This month we have been exploring the theme of “Making Space for Nature” from a wide range of different angles. We started with an editorial piece which argued that one of the key things that nature can bring our work doing Transition is a sense of wonder. Something to do with glowworms apparently. We grabbed […]
The community of Totnes in Devon just reached a historic agreement which represents the next step for Transition, a huge leap forward in ambition, scale and possibility. In 2007, the Dairy Crest site in Totnes closed, and 163 jobs were lost. This came on top of a number of other major employers also closing, and […]
Aniol Esteban is head of Environmental Economics at the New Economics Foundation. He is a biologist and environmental economist. He is the author of, among other things, Natural Solutions: Nature’s role in delivering well-being and key policy goals – opportunities for the third sector, published by nef. I started by asking what, for him, is […]
At birth we are the buds, the tips of the tree of life. Our parents are the twigs on which we sprout, our ancestors the branches, and the boughs and trunk are as old as life itself. We are gifted with a precious heirloom, our jewel-like strings of genes. Worked and reworked through our long […]
“Did you grow all those yourself?”, a young woman asked me last week at Transition Town Tooting’s 7th Foodival. She was pointing to a wicker basket filled with the aromatic lemon balm, rosemary, anise hyssop, marjoram and a dozen or so more herbs and flowers I was preparing tea from at the event: “A lot of […]
Richard Louv is a journalist and author of a number of books, most famously Last Child in the Woods, first published in 2005. His most recent book is The Nature Principle. Last Child in the Woods coined the term ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ to describe the impacts that isolation from nature could be seen to be […]
At the end of the Peoples’ Climate March in London, the last speaker, from Avaaz, asked the crowd to think of a place, or a person, that they really cherished, and to hold them in their thoughts during a minute’s silence. To remember who it is that you are there for. You could have heard […]
David Nobbs is a writer, mostly of novels, of which he has done over 20. He has also written for television, most famously The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and A Bit of a Do. He is soon to turn 80 but is still working full time, and lives in Harrogate in Yorkshire. He […]
Transition Langport started with the appreciation and love of nature at its heart, for nature, with its abundance and support for life, is what brings so many of us together. We want to protect, enhance and value nature’s life supporting qualities. As a community we are lucky to live at the heart of the Somerset […]
I like the idea of ‘making space for Nature’. I like space, gaps and emptiness. I like Nature. Yet as I began to unpack the topic in readiness for this blog I began to feel like I was sitting in a box looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Nature is all we have, […]
Mary-Jayne Rust is an art therapist, a Jungian analyst, a feminist psychotherapist and an ecopsychologist. She runs a small private practice seeing individuals in North London, and also gives talks, workshops and courses and seminars in the field of ecopsychology. She is the editor, with Nick Totton, of the recently published Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological […]
Ted Trainer’s recent paper, Transition Townspeople, we need to think about Transition: just doing stuff is far from enough!, generated a certain amount of attention at the recent Degrowth conference in Leipzig. Most of what I would say in response to it I have already said in previous exchanges with Trainer, and his arguments remain […]
This month’s Roundup covers stories from July and August, so we’ve quite a bit to get through! In July, Transition City Lancaster and Transition Network came together recently to hold the first trial Roadshow. It was the pilot for another four that will run over the next seven months. The Lancaster event, hosted at the […]
Caspar Walsh’s childhood combined “experience of nature, of writing, rehabilitation from crime, drugs and alcohol, and generally a pretty dysfunctional upbringing”. “I had these three things which were nature, writing and community” he told me. After years as a professional writer, he had what he calls his “aha moment” and thought “maybe I can bring these […]
Last night I attended the book launch, at Schumacher College, of Julian Ponsonby’s new book Gaia’s Feasts. It contains many of the recipes used in the College’s kitchen, which, as anyone who has ever eaten there will know, produces incredible meals on a daily basis, strongly rooted in local, seasonal and organic food. One of […]
Here is another piece I wrote recently for the Guardian Live Better Challenge: Can supermarkets ever be sustainable? Walmart’s new boss is on a mission. Will his drive for renewable energy and waste reduction transform the supermarket model? In his recent appearance on Desert Island Discs, former Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy, described small independent […]
Anecdotally, at least, honey-bees are doing far better in cities like London than in the countryside, and so are foxes. I don’t think the abundance of foxes in cities is entirely due to their migration in search of Big Mac’s and KFC and nor can the thriving bee populations be attributed solely to a ready […]
It feels to me like an important moment in the evolution of Transition – the first novel in which Transition plays a key role, published by one of the UK’s largest publishers. It’s also a great read, and it’s oddly thrilling to think that on beaches around the world this summer people were reading this story […]
It’s that time of year when Open Eco Homes events happen up and down the country. Totnes are doing it, as are Bridport, West Bridgford, Lewes, Stroud and others. A Green Open Homes event is an opportunity to ask a neighbour about an energy saving improvment that they’ve made, and see if it might work for you. […]
Tooting is a busy London suburb stretching between and beyond two tube stations (Tooting Bec and Broadway) and along the A24, originally a Roman road and now a major arterial road carrying 10 million cars a year and numerous bus routes. One of our earliest TTT blog posts shows a map and satellite image of […]
In July I had the great privilege of chairing George Monbiot’s presentation on rewilding at the Ways With Words literary festival at Dartington Hall. Before the talk we found a quiet corner and chatted for about half an hour about the book, and some of the ideas and issues it raises. If you’d rather download […]
Here is a recent piece I wrote for The Guardian’s Living Better Challenge: Putting a stop to water waste: why local initiatives are key: Cities facing drought can generate water and jobs by planting trees, and installing tanks and rainwater harvesting systems Los Angeles imports 89% of its water. Every year it spends over $350m (£211m) […]
It’s dusk. The family who arrived earlier in the day and pitched their tent next to ours have just asked us if we’d like to join them for a short walk to see “something magical”. We walk in the near-darkness down a grassy track to a lane with hedgerows on either side, the sea away […]
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