New Transition Free Press hits the streets
By rob hopkins 14th May 2014
The latest edition of Transition Free Press came out this week, Issue No.5, the Spring/Summer edition, and it is a marvellous creation. For this new edition, TFP has broadened its remit from just news and initiatives from the Transition movement to Transition in the wider sense, and it’s a richer, and more inspiring publication as a result. You can read all about it here, and find out how to get a copy, buy a bundle for your Transition group, or better still, become a subscriber. They write that “Transition Free Press is designed as a paper you can hold in your hands”, which is part of its power, but you can also read it online here.
Here is editor Charlotte Du Cann’s opening editorial which beautifully sets the tone for what you will find in TFP’s colourful and rich pages:
“Welcome to our new Spring edition! We’re stepping out into our second year of Transition Free Press, after a successful pilot during 2013, and hope you will keep following our tracks as we cross into uncharted territory.
“We’ve gone as far as data and facts can take us, now something else has to kick in,” food consultant Geoff Tansey told a group of artists who had gathered to collaborate on a book about Transition and the arts called Playing for Time.
Transition Free Press is a paper reporting on that ‘something else’: the people who are shifting from a growth-at-all-costs culture to one that will get us and the Earth we love back on track.
Like all great artists, this new culture works as an intervention into ‘normal’ life, reminding everyone how earthly life is unpredictable, funny, risky, inventive, beautiful; how regeneration can happen on every street corner and that the everyday world is rich.
Facts about climate change and peak resources are necessary to know, that’s clear – but what makes for a sea-change is when you sense another kind of world is out there. That’s a world where you find yourself walking across the street in a swimsuit, sowing beans under the Fenland sky, taking part in a play about apples on Tooting Bec Common. Taking a long walk across the nation with strangers who feel like kin.
Most of all it’s about noticing what kind of life we wish for, given a chance to work it out: getting a deep sense of time, that is not the time of the clock; a change of mood, that is not anxious or mean; paying attention to the seasons like foragers and poets. So though the data may predict the same outcomes, we realise our feeling about things have radically changed.
At the heart of this May-July issue is a story about The Restart Project that inspires people to pick up their broken technology and learn how to mend it themselves – with a little help from others in the neighbourhood. It demonstrates the magic of experiential life. How things can turn around just by our getting engaged. Like all great Transition projects it says: we can take this into our own hands: we can revitalise democracy, sort out the waste crisis, start our own currency, run our own paper! Right here, right now.
Because this not an individual shift. The Earth has come about via extraordinary and unlikely collaborations between beings you might not ordinarily see. It’s as much about how we work together in small and often invisible ways as it is about the direction we take. For 2014 our aim is to keep celebrating those collaborations and give you glimpses into that possible world. In these spring and summer pages we’re welcoming initiatives and campaigns that run alongside the Transition movement and a brand new editorial team. Come on in! The water is lovely.
Charlotte, Alexis, Mark, Amy, Chris, Michaela, Gavin, Marion, Mike, Eva and Tess