Today sees the launch of three exciting new developments and outputs
from Transition Network, the results of many months of work, that finally emerge
blinking into the daylight.
We are sure that they will greatly deepen your understanding of Transition,
bring depth and richness to your work, re-inspire and energise you. They
represent a radical shift in how Transition is understood and communicated.
They are, in no particular order,
- The book: ‘The Transition Companion’
- The online directory: The Transition Ingredients and Tools
- The beautiful set of Ingredients and Tools Cards: to be used to better
understand all this
Together, they represent a sea-change in how we understand what Transition is
and how to do it. So, let’s have a look at those things one-by-one.
The book: The Transition Companion
This new book, which replaces ‘The Transition Handbook’, is the result of 18
months of a collaborative process involving people from Transition initiatives
around the world.
It reframes Transition as a collection of
‘ingredients’ and ‘tools’ which each initiative assembles in its own way. It is
rich with stories, artwork, case studies and photos contributed by Transition
initiatives themselves.
It is rich with insight and the kind of wisdom
that can only come from an open-source 5 year global experiment such as
Transition. It represents a quantum leap forward in the Transition movement, a
deepening, a maturing, and a very tangible vision of where all of this might go
and how we might be most confident of actually getting there. It has 320 pages,
and is in full colour, It’s probably got a picture of you in it somewhere…
How to order the book
You can order it
from
me (which would be great), from
Green
Books, from
Beetroot
Books, from
Amazon
(if you must), or even better, from your much-endangered local bookshop, or
order it through your local library. If you are in the US you can order it from
the US publisher
Chelsea
Green. There are no plans for an audio book. I’ll also be speaking about
the book, answering questions, and picking some of my favourite records (Desert
Island Discs-style) on the Transition Show on
StroudFM,
2pm this Friday.
The online ingredients directory
As well as being gathered together in the book, the
ingredients have also been put online in an interactive, interlinked,
technologically dazzling kind of jamboree.
Our Transition Network Vebmasters have excelled themselves with this, their
finest creation to date.
You will notice the homepage now looks rather different, with the ingredients
as a major theme. All the ingredients, and all the tools, are now online, each
with space for comments and feedback.
There is also the “Transition Ingredientator”, otherwise known as “Add your
own ingredient”, which will give you the opportunity to draft any that you feel
we have neglected.
These will be moderated over the coming months.
You can either view the ingredients in the 5 stages as set out in the
book:
… or see them in a directory format:
This is an invaluable resource, I hope you find it really useful and link to
them often.
The beautiful set of ingredients cards
At the 2011 Transition Network conference
we
trialled a card game based on the Ingredients.
The idea was that they might help you to familiarise people with them, to
better understand the ways in which your group is working, and also to identify
ways in which it might be more effective.
They were very popular, and so the wonderful Marina Vons-Gupta has produced a
set of beautiful cards which you can download for free, print out (instructions
are provided) and use.
Some games are suggested, but they are made available on the basis that you
are invited to create you own games and share them, so that in the future we can
update them. They should hopefully prove to be a really useful
resource.
Download the full set of ingredients cards
Let us know what you think.
Explaining Transition in a new way
We have also reworked the
Why
do Transition? page on this site, and what was the Transition Primer and
other pieces has now been condensed into the link-tastic
‘What
is a Transition initiative’ page.
The above projects have been inputted into by thousands of people, but I
would particularly like to thank a few people who have put an amazing amount of
work and creativity into them, namely Marina, Ed, Laura, Amber, Helen, Ben,
Naresh, Sophy, Jim and everyone at Green Books.
It is five years since we kick started this whole Transition thing, which is
now active in 34 countries around the world in thousands of communities.
These new iterations of what Transition is represent as deep a shift as the
emergence of the whole idea was in the first place. They are a distillation of
all the bravery, innovation, generosity, kindness, success, failure and genius
that everyone involved in this has poured into it for the past 5 years.
As a result, they embody a richness and a maturity that is quite
extraordinary, yet they remain intensely focused and practical, indeed far more
practical than what went before. Today is a landmark, a key milestone, and I’ll
leave the last word to Denise Levertov, the poet,
who
captures how I feel about this:
Brilliant, this day — a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by
sharpest scissors, deft hands.
Rob Hopkins, October, 2011 (original
article on Transition Culture)
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