2012-02-10T13:33:00.000Z

Hooray! We now have our blog up and running.

Welcome to the first post of the Transition Bath Blog. We've been talking about getting this going for a while now, so please excuse us whilewe raise a glass (clink).

So why all the celebration you ask? Well, because we want touse this blog as a celebration in itself – a celebration of all that isTransition Bath, the Transition movement as a whole and, of course, all the people engaged with it. We want to post stories, news, anecdotes, joy, tears (of joy),laughter (more joy) and occasionally a little mayhem (yes, Green Visionguerrilla gardeners; we’re looking at you).

This blog will be an outlet for all involved in TransitionBath to have a say. That is a say on anything: what they’ve been up to, what they are up to and what they intend to be up to, and more importantly, why they’re up to it. We want tobring out the personal side of our organisation. Everybody has a Transitionstory inside them and we want to extract thsoe (in the nicest possible way) andget them posted on here.

If you subscribe to the blog, you can guarantee a goodsupply of interesting, relevant and topical material to brighten up your inbox every week or so.

So, for our first post, we are going to print Tom Youngman’s account ofhis time at the UN Climate Change negotiations in Durban last December. Tom, who is co- founder the youth climate movement Green Vision, sent this into the newsteam last month, but we couldn’t print the full version in the newsletter, even though we really wanted to.There are no such restrictions with our shiny new blog; so here you go. Over to you Tom…

In mid-December I returned fromthe adventure of the lifetime - three weeks at the United Nations climatechange negotiations in Durban, South Africa. Just before leaving I recordedthis video.As you can see, I was exhausted, if still adrenalised, and somewhatdowntrodden. The climax to the conference had been a closed, undemocraticprocess - a huge contrast to the lively civil society action that had definedthe rest of the conference.

Durban was filled with people ofevery nation, passionate about finding a solution to the climate crisis.Especially among the young people present, the atmosphere was vibrant in theface of a lack of agency, taking creative action at every availableopportunity. From the individual action of Abigail Borah, a young American whostood up in plenary and screamed a speech in place of her negotiator tothe mass action of hundreds of people, young and old, occupying the conference centre,civil society broke the boundaries imposed by international diplomacy to makethe moral voice the loudest one.

So how can I bring this energyand solidarity back to Bath? It's going to be hard. I tried to communicate atthe time - some of you might have been to Green Vision's 'People's Kitchen' event with which I linked up live - but even now, weekslater, I'm finding it hard, as I've tried to explain in this longer reflectionon my time at the negotiations.Mostly I think it's taught me to take a step back - that giving people spaceand time to take their own action is as important than trying to inspire peopleto do so. A very 'Transition' mantra.

Lastly I'd like to thankthose of you that supported me in any way in the run-up to the negotiations, beit financially or otherwise. To have my community behind me in this wasboth exciting and humbling. If you'd like to know more about my trip, read thisblog article and don't hesitate to get in touch.

Tom Youngman