What have been the really ‘wicked’ questions that you have asked candidates and other community leaders? By ‘wicked’ I mean those questions that opened new space, started new questions and also gave you a real feel for who is interested in engaging in the deeper dialogue and not just giving this issue air-time in order to get a few more votes? Not questions that test but ones that invite and open us to engage with each other?

Alexis

Mr Vert – The proposed Resilience Hustings are not designed to be a typical engagement with the political process. We’re asking politicians to come along and be keynote listeners, to sit through a screening of “In Transition”, to partake in a Transition experience. We want them to understand how we view the world. The aim is not to get involved in the standard mud-slinging.

Our experience in Transition Belsize is that politicians are genuinely surprised and pleased by the inclusive welcome they get, that they do listen, and that they go away having learnt something and enthused. That’s all we’re asking for.

Alexis

Mr. Vert, if you are serious about sustainability, then getting ivolved in politics is unavoidable. I don’t mean by this joining a political party, but taking part in decision making as a citizen. If one says that that he or she is not interested in politics, it means that he or she is not interested in deciding what kind of energy system there is or where the food comes from. These things are regulated by law, and writing the law is the domain of politics. I think it’s great that Transition Towns are planning to get involved in the coming elections on all sorts of levels. It makes a huge difference to the local projects if your city council is supportive. And the best thing about it is that you can actually choose your city council by simply casting a vote

Actual numbers behind ‘wellbeing and flourishing’:

One place is at the Genuine Progress Indicator http://www.rprogress.org/publications/2007/GPI2006_ExecSumm.pdf I don’t think their website has the statistics that their pdf reports do.

I just received my copy of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth and it looks like the opening chapters may answer your question (although I haven’t yet read them).

I have not yet read James Gustave Speth’s Bridge at the Edge of the World but this online snip from the intro indicates what you seek is in his Chapter 5. http://www.thebridgeattheedgeoftheworld.com/excerpt-introduction/ He is a Yale professor and always heavy on footnotes.

You might also find it in Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (my copy is out on loan right now so I cannot check it). I’m not certain whether he footnotes sources of his stuff.

And Dave Wann’s Simple Prosperity chapter 2 has footnotes that would be worth followup. Wann refers to the work of Lord Richard Layard, with whom I’m not familiar but there’s a transcript of one of his talks linked from here http://www.brookings.edu/events/2005/0209poverty.aspx

Development is a political question, it is no good depoliticising these issues, people have very different views and politics tries to be an arbiter. What is needed is a broadening of political debate from social democracy to the emancipatory idea of ecological democracy, from representative to participative democracy. Unfortunately, Mr Vert, most debate at present is anything but politicised, it is commodified by the market.

One thing I’d like to ask in this is what about science and technology. This does not really figure anywhere in this discussion and yet this web-site is a product of a technology that 20 years ago was unimaginable to me

Thanks.

Politicizing TT is a huge tactical error.

If you want to be successful, keep on doing what you are doing – working at the grassroots level outside the political machine. Focus your energies and be successful. Then watch the politicians come to you.

“BUT most people are inherently selfish. It’s unrealistic to try to change the way they think and behave to help others or the environment.

Yes, it is certainly true that all people inherently have a capacity to be selfish at times.”

To me this reads as a quite a negative statement, and I’m not sure that ‘selfishness’ is inherent or certain, at least not in ALL people…

how about “It may be true that people have can behave selfishly at times”

Depending on how you format your document, this section presents itself as the first intro to peak oil. Yet that opening sentence under #1 Resource Depletion kind of backs into the definition of peak oil. I would turn the paragraph around to explain peak oil. I would also switch the tenses in the final sentence so that the old paradigm sounds antiquated:

#1 Resource Depletion
Peak oil – the imminent peaking in world conventional oil production – is just one of many such production peaks. For example, natural gas is also near its production peak, as is phosphorus (a critical component of chemical fertilizer). Peak oil is of particular concern because of the degree to which our society is dependent upon it. Peak oil will result in increasingly volatile oil prices, which, as the price spike of 2008 showed when oil reached $147 a barrel, impacts profoundly on our oil-dependent economies. We are moving from a time when our economic success and personal prowess were directly linked to how much oil we consumed, to a time when our oil dependency is a key vulnerability.

In #2 climate change I would refer to “the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks” rather than just “Copenhagen” if you plan to use the document more than a month or so.

I had to read the opening line of #3 Economic Globalization several times to understand it, so I would say “not just food miles, but ‘virtually …”

It was good to see #5 Wellbeing and Flourishing elevated to the level of the other bullets in this section. It will be useful to have it there, plus it allows the section to end on an upbeat note. But the paragraph itself was quite confusing and it included UK/Europe references that were not particularly useful around the world. I suggest:
#5. Wellbeing and Flourishing
Extra growth not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness. If one plots a line on a graph that shows the growth of our economy, that line is echoed by other similarly rising graphs modeling indebtedness, stress-related illness, crime and many other less desirable trends. Having more consumer goods has made us happy up to a certain point, but since the 1960s we have not grown happier as a society in spite of our increasing wealth.

Thank you for creating this.

The correct link is:
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/snsg-03373.pdf