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)
