Beeston Transition Initiative

The Age of Stupid is a new film starring Pete Postlethwaite. Set in an apocalyptic post-climate change future it looks back on what went wrong and why.

A group from Beeston Transition attended the opening of the film at the Broadway cinema in Nottingham on 24 April. There was also a related exhibition featuring a variety of environmental groups in the Broadway mezzanine.

Please share your views on the film in the comments on this blog.

On the 25th of April Transition Nottingham hosted the Great Sharing - Unleashing the potential of Transition Nottingham Local Groups. Lots of ideas came out of the day and the notes are now posted on the forum. If you want to have a look and comment etc the link to the forum is here.
http://forum.transitionnottingham.org.uk/index.php/board,18.0.html
The day was so succesful another is being planned!

Beeston Transition are inviting entries into our logo competition. If you fancy putting pen to paper, or mouse to computer, and getting your creative juices flowing then read on.

The logo will be for use by the Beeston Transition group on all our posters, websites and flyers. You don't need to be a top designer, it's your ideas and your creativity we are interested in.

The design needs to reflect our aims of overcoming environmental challenges and building a greener, more sustainable community. We are also looking for a design which captures some aspect of Beeston.

There are two categories for entries:

a) Under 16

b) Over 16

Entries should be emailed to jennyallen7777@yahoo.co.uk by Friday 15 May 2009. There will be a small prize for the winning entry in both categories. For more information contact us via the email above or via this page.

On Saturday March 14th, the Beeston Transition's Kitchen Garden was launched with over 70 people helping to plant trees and vegetables, as well as enjoying music and food at the Wollaton Road Allotment site. A mulberry bush, a damson tree and 20 hazel hedging plants were planted at the Kitchen Garden, thanks to a grant from the Greenwood Community Forest Team Volunteers also helped to dig over the new beds and plant onions, garlic, broad beans and jerusalem artichokes. The hard work was followed by tea, coffee, homemade cakes and biscuits, and a well-earned rest. Nottingham musician Solomon Smith provided an uplifting musical accompaniment to the planting and refreshments, and won himself some new fans in the process.   Thanks to all of those who came along and helped make the afternoon a great success. The Kitchen Garden Team will meet at the site on Central Avenue on the second Saturday of every month from 10.30 to 12.30. If you want to get involved, or just watch progress throughout the year, then please come along or contact us.

This animated 20 minute film has a modern feel and is very professionally produced. Annie appears in film and is our narrator throughout. Apart from her image the rest of the screen is white with black cartoons appearing behind her. Very much in the school teacher in front of white board fashion, which actually neatly sums up how Annie's manner comes across - very teacherly. This isn't a bad thing, per se, but it does make it a little hard to engage with the film as you do feel a bit like you're in a lecture.

But focusing on the content, this is very sound. The film is based upon the five stages of the consumption society: extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. Each stage is considered in turn and Annie has a wide view on the impacts of these taking in the impact on the third world, on immigration, on workers and on health. She also discusses the relationship between government and big business and the power dynamics that exist presently.

Some very interesting facts in the film, though I can't see anywhere on the website where you can get source information or check dates etc. One that was fascinating was that 99% of 'stuff' purchased in the US is thrown away within six months. That's shocking, even if you did think it was likely to be high.

The concepts of planned and perceived obselesence are discussed which I found enlightening. Both terms I've heard of but not really considered in the context of my own purchasing habits. Can be helpful in terms of taking a step back 'do I really need this...' I think the suspicion that one is being manipulated can really help to take the cosy shopper-shopping feeling away and make you a bit more thoughtful about these things. She also recognises the bigger sense of self aspect of the shopping bug and how this validates us as people. She responds that we need to break the habit of sitting in front of tv, getting told we need to buy stuff, so we work and shop and end up knacked in front of tv, etc etc. Her focus for the solution is on friends, family and leisure time. I was particularly pleased that the film acknowledged that recycling is not the answer, which is a fairly brave stance to take when many people might say focus on the smaller more achieveable aims.

I was disappointed however that the film doesn't focus that much on the potential solutions, just two minutes or so of a total of 20. Perhaps this is to keep it more factual so it can be shown in schools etc, but for me it was a bit of a missed opportunity. Apparently over 4 million people have viewed the film but I imagine much less have browsed the site for the recommendations for alternatives to this problem. The film contents itself with calling for us to base our new society on sustainability, justice, health and community. Very laudible but a bit more on this might have been good. The website itself includes some quite focused items on the alternatives, including a page on ten options for another way. These are all good and range from personal lifestyle changes up to encouragements to march and demonstrate to get changes in your community.

All in all a good short film, ideal for kids and young people, but in a similar vein to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth in that it identifies the problem without doing much to set out a way forward.

- JA

On 14 February we held our first Beeston Transition Seed Swap. Over 150 people attended and got the chance to give and receive some seeds, get advice on growing their own food, composting, seed saving and more.

Please post your comments from the Seed Swap here. We are particularly interested in your feedback on the event itself and how we could improve for next year. We also invite you to let us know whether your sowing produced good results and whether there were any surprises! 

Beeston Transition Initiative has been offered an area at the Beeston Community Garden (see photos below).  The Community Garden is on the Wollaton Road Allotment site and has an orchard, pond and wild area, a number of growing areas and a polytunnel.  There are plans to erect an educational building there too.

If you are interested in getting involved in this worthwhile project, please use the email form on the contact page and we will get in touch with you. 

Join us for the launch of the Beeston Community Kitchen Garden on Saturday 14th March from 2pm to 4pm. At the Community Allotment, Central Avenue, Beeston. Will include tree planting, music, food and more. Supported by Greenwood.

BBC Radio Nottingham are running a ‘switch off’ experiment on Wednesday 18th February. The idea is that everyone in Nottingham switches off all unnecessary appliances from 9pm on 18th Feb until 6am. Central Networks will monitor the change in electricity consumption and report back to say how much difference the switch off made. Presumably they don’t want you to actually turn off the radio… For full info click here. 

I found this to be extremely low-brow and alarmist. The author presents assertion as fact without exploring alternative arguments. The author appears to reject transition models as a means to survive the oil shocks and suggests praying instead. If, as I think his argument for the failure of transition is based on an analogy with the ‘tragedy of the commons’, then my feeling is that he doesn’t fully understand the game-theoretic and evolutionary mechanisms that can resolve commons dilemmas. He cites the argument that self-regulating and cooperative communities are subject to predation to the point of extinction. In this analogy he means the transition community. This is only half of the story, and nature demonstrates that it simply not true because every (successful) group has mechanisms to resist and deter predation. An example of this in nature is dialect. An example in transition might be local currencies. Read it with a pinch of salt.  RJT