Transition Town Meeting In Nottingham

If people in the East Midlands are interested in Transition Towns there is a talk on Tuesday 27th May at the Nottingham Mechanics , South Sherwood St at 7.30 by Rob Hopkins, the architect of the Transition Town movement in the UK. The talk is entitled 'From oil dependancy to local resilience'.
Penney Poyzer, Nottinghams very own "Queen of Green" will also be speaking there.

From the Wikipedia article linked above:

The Transition concept emerged from work permaculture designer Rob Hopkins had done with the students of Kinsale Further Education College in writing an ‘Energy Descent Action Plan’. This looked at across-the-board creative adaptations in the realms of energy production, health, education, economy and agriculture as a ‘road map’ to a sustainable future for the town, and was unanimously adopted by Kinsale Council.

The idea was adapted and expanded in September 2006 to Hopkins' hometown of Totnes where he is now based. The initiative spread quickly, and as of 25 April 2008, there are over fifty communities recognised as official Transition Towns[2] in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. While referred to as Towns, the communities involved range from villages (Kinsale), through council districts (Penwith) to cities and city boroughs (Brixton).

Survivors to return to TV

I have in the past referred to Terry Nation's memorable 1970s apocalyptic drama series Survivors as raising interesting questions and even playing a role in the growth of the green movement in Britain.

After much talk since the success of the new version of Doctor Who back in 2006, it seems that a new version of the drama is set to arrive on our screens. The new version is to be written by Adrian Hodges, responsible for bringing two of Philip Pullman's gothic dramas to life and the promising, but perhaps ultimately disappointing Primeval on ITV.

This follows the success of the CBS post-apocalyptic drama Jericho, set in small town America in the aftermath of a series of nuclear explosions in the USA. (N.B. - I have just had news that CBS have today again cancelled further episodes of Jericho)

The new Survivors has been discussed on a variety of blogs, forums and sites over the last 6 months or so. It is actually going to be a dramatisation of Terry Nation's novel rather than a remake of the three original series.

Here and here are fan sites of the original Survivors with some nice pics and links. Here is the TV Gold discussion forum for Survivors.

Finally, there is a blog on the progress of the new Survivors, which linked my own humble ruminations of last year.

Whilst we are on the subject of survival and resilience, perhaps it is not too much of a leap to link to the increasingly popular ideas of Transition Towns.

A Transition Initiative is a community that is unleashing its own latent collective genius to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and to discover and implement ways to address this BIG question:

"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain
itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate
the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to
mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"

The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway.

The community also recognises two crucial points:

* that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there's no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope
* if we collectively plan and act early enough there's every likelihood that we can create a way of living that's significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.

Food for thought....