13 Mar 2013
Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA
Here is one of the finest TED talks I have ever seen. “Gardening is the most defiant act you can do in the city”, “Get gangsta with your shovel” and “plant some shit”. Brilliant.
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Here is one of the finest TED talks I have ever seen. “Gardening is the most defiant act you can do in the city”, “Get gangsta with your shovel” and “plant some shit”. Brilliant.
Recently, Shane Hughes of the Transition Network’s REconomy Project gave a talk at TEDxLausanne (in Switzerland) called ‘Sleeping giants of economic shift’. In it he explores what an alternative to our current global economic model could look like, and how REconomy, and a number of other approaches, are central to that.
I hadn’t heard of James Balog, whose work is the subject of ‘Chasing Ice’, until I saw him give a presentation at TED Global in Oxford in 2008. It was in a session after supper, along with Nigeran novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an evening optional extra for anyone who still had any headspace after a day of back-to-back talks. I didn’t know anything about James’ project, the Extreme Ice Survey. What he shared that night was so powerful that I was unable to sleep. Unlike much that one might read about climate change, the debates, the research, the statistics which appeal to our rational mind, Balog’s work was visceral. You could feel it in your stomach. It haunted you, while at the same time stunning you with its breathtaking beauty. That’s a powerful combination, and it is that combination that makes ‘Chasing Ice’ such an extraordinary and vital film.
As mentioned previously, during the 2012 Transition Network conference I spoke at the TEDx Madrid event by Skype, being joined at the end by Juan del Rio. The film of that has now been posted online, and so here it is.
Let’s start this month’s round up in Australia. Transition Sydney also recently held an event about social enterprise and reviving local economies through resilience-building, entitled the ‘Living Economies Forum’, with a great range of speakers. Here is the poster. One of them was Michael Shuman, and here is his excellent talk, called ”Building Resilient Local Economies through Local Investment”: