Archive for “Technology” category
1 - 5 of 59 posts
23 Jun 2010
Been a while since I had a rant here on Transition Culture, but with just over two hours to go until England probably get knocked out of the World Cup, which will no doubt inspire another, here is a heart-felt rail against a hideous new phenomenon. I wrote a while ago about the proposed London ‘Cloud’, a pollution of our mental environment on a dreadful scale in London (haven’t heard anything as to whether this is getting the go-ahead or not). Well yesterday I came across another such mental pollution, on a smaller scale, but equally dreadful. I boarded the 4.57 from Plymouth to Totnes yesterday, and found myself in one of First Great Western’s shiny new carriages. To my horror, on the back of every seat, at eye level, was a colour television, each silently running through trailers for sports, documentaries, kids programmes and so on that you can now watch (at a cost) on your train journey.
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18 Mar 2010
How do you see the relationship between sustainability and resilience as concepts? Is resilience part of sustainability? Is sustainability part of resilience?
I guess for me sustainability is kind of a boring word but we’re stuck with it. But I tend to like resilience because it implies an active disposition to be able to withstand, it’s more of an engineering and mathematical term, but to be able to withstand disturbances. Some parameters change, some factors shift, and the system is able to adjust. There’s enough slack in the system that it works. So for me, at a minimum, sustainability implies resilience. In any definition of sustainability the system has got to be resilient to disturbances.
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18 Mar 2010
A while ago, Transition Network came up with an inspired and detailed strategy for how it wanted its new website to be, designed as one to best enable Transition Network to, well, network. It was described by a participant at the workshop that unveiled it at the 2009 Transition Network conference as “the best web strategy I’ve seen since I first got involved in the internet and software in 1994″. Well, now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Ed Mitchell and his team, it is now a reality, and it is over you all to make it your own. It is indeed a fabulous creation. Here I hand over to Ed, who will introduce you to the marvel that is the new Transition Network website….
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17 Mar 2010
David Orr in London. Note the offending highly energy wasteful chandeliers behind him (referred to in the interview)
David Orr was in the UK recently, and the two of us were part of a panel at an event organised by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. After the event, we retired to the bar of a rather grand London hotel, and chatted for an hour about energy, climate change, the Precautionary Principle, Transition and whether or not we are beyond talk of ’solutions’. Part two will follow shortly.
So, how would you introduce yourself?
I’m David Orr. I teach at Oberlin College in Ohio and I also work as Senior Advisor to the President of the college on environmental issues generally, but specifically on the redevelopment of the town and the college to carbon neutrality, a 20,000 acre green belt and the revitalised downtown corridor.
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15 Mar 2010
A while ago now I was in London for the launch of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment’s ‘Building a New Green Economy’ conference, where I was a speaker alongside Tim Jackson, David Orr and Stewart Brand. You can read about the event here, and films of our talks will be posted soon. I mention it today because I want to draw your attention to the report launched at the conference, Sustainable Supply Chains that Support Local Economic Development, available to download here. As someone who has, for many years, been fascinated by local, natural building materials, this is a fascinating piece of research, one of the first things I have seen which starts trying to calculate the financial benefits to an area of moving towards more locally-sourced building materials.
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