Transition Sheffield - Discussion Forum

Hi everyone,

Yvonne and myself are organising a display about Transition Sheffield in Sheffield Library for April.

We're putting together some artwork that could be used again as stand alone display boards.
See the link: Display boards.pdf and let us know what you think!

Corrections & sugestions welcome.

Plus there's a few inches of space in front of the boards for some 3D objects - eg. wellies, spade, seeds, model wind turbine... If you have anything unusual to put there, then let us know.

Cheers, Susannah

I think you have done a great job with the typesetting / presentation but the content seems a bit weak -- should we be shying away from pointing out how bad things are? If we do then I don't think we are going to help the dramatic changes that are needed to happen.

The first board "Did you know?" -- I expect that most people *do* know about things like pollution and greed already, but perhaps people are not aware of the big problems that get minimal coverage in the media:

• We are probably past or close to passing global peak oil production.
• The UK is past peak coal, gas and oil production and the quantity of fossil fuel we are importing is rising dramatically every year.
• The climate situation is critical, the safe level for CO2 might be 350ppm but we are approaching 390ppm.
• The overall impact of global human civilization is such that without a rapid and dramatic change of direction we are probably heading towards planetary ecocide.

I think it would also be worth raising some of the questions that we don't have answers to, and pointing out that we hope to contribute to answering these questions and that we want to see a grass roots, collective answer to these problems:

Without fossil fuels how are we going to:

• Feed everyone when each calorie of food currently produced uses perhaps 10 calories of fossil fuels.
• Heat and light our homes.
• Travel -- around 90% of transportation is powered with oil.

I think ideally we would have a display that is hard hitting and makes people really stop and think about key issues like peak oil and climate change, not something that is so bland that it gets glanced at and ignored.

Thanks both of you.

I've updated the materials in response to various comments. Hope this is a reasonable compromise and addresses your points sufficiently. The nev version is at: Transition_Sheffield_Display_Boards.pdf

Susuannah