An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent
Archive for “TED Talks” category
Showing 5 results for the category: TED Talks.
7 Oct 2009
Carolyn Steel on How Food Shapes Our Cities
Here is one of the best talks I saw at TED 2009 in Oxford, Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent ‘Hungry City’.
6 Aug 2009
Paul Romer on Charter Cities… can you spot the flaws?
Am home for a couple of days, and spotted that some of the TED talks have started going up. Here, as a sort of Transition Culture Summer Homework, is Paul Romer’s talk on ‘Charter Cities’ which I was so critical about in my write up. It offers a fascinating taste of unbridled human hubris, of an economist with no sense of economic or resource constraints, no sense of living within our means or of peak anything, no sense that perhaps unbridled neo-liberal free trade economics have been anything other than to the dazzling wellbeing of everyone. Have a look. Be fascinated to hear your thoughts on it. My two highlights are his raising the question as to why no-one else has thought of building cities in deserts, and the bit near the end where he says …“there is no roadblock, there is no impediment, other than a failure of imagination that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win win solution”. See what you think.
27 Jul 2009
Some Notes from the Final Day of TED Global in Oxford
The first session of the last day was ‘Cities Past and Future’. First speaker was Eric Sanderson, who gave an absolutely mesmering presentation about his work on the Mannahatta Project. It is based around asking the question, what would the land on which New York now stands have looked like in the 1600s when Hudson first rowed up the river? A simple question, but the results of the work combine cartography, GIS, biology, ethanography, and much much more.
24 Jul 2009
A Full Day at the 2009 TED Global in Oxford
- TED speaker Taryn Simon showing a photo of the Braille version of Playboy magazine (seriously)…
What an extraordinary day. I missed days one and two of TED, which, if they were anywhere near as good as today, was a big loss. A day of fascinating speakers, even the ones I disgreed with were interesting… Set in the Oxford Playhouse, the day was well presented, well hosted, and had a great buzz. It divided into 4 sections. I’ll just give a few thoughts on some of the presenters. Over at the TED blog is a detailed write up of each speaker and some good photos, far more detail than I am going to manage! So the first session was called ‘Radical Development’.
