Please join me and my guests at 4pm BST (that’s 11AM ET or 8AM PT) for today’s Webinar entitled ‘Local Economic Blueprints: pioneering or pointless?’ You can read more about the webinar here, download the Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint which we’ll be discussing here, see more about the Herefordshire Blueprint here, and the latest on Brixton’s here. It will all unfold magically in the box below, so see you here later for an hour’s fascinatingdiscussion.
The other day I read an excellent piece by Calvin Jones, Professor of Economics at Cardiff Business School (see right) called Technology Cannot Tackle Climate Change. Having argued that, due to a range of issues, economic growth is no longer possible, he writes:
“Faced with these issues it is easy to withdraw into either a belief in an economic growth fairy, or into passive, nihilistic depression. But this is not necessary. Many societies historically have functioned perfectly well without ever-increasing levels of growth and complexity”.
He also wrote “the cognitive dissonance we feel, as GDP figures rise, and we feel ever more tired, stressed and scared, is real, and must be challenged”, rapidly becoming one of my favourite quotes. Given the challenges of condensing complex arguments into short articles, I thought it would be good to have a chat with Calvin. So what follows is either the audio file to listen to while you’re hoovering the stairs, or a transcript of our talk.
Here’s a fantastic video from DW (“Germany’s International Broadcaster”) about Transition in South Africa. It is a clip from a longer programme called ‘Global 3000: The Globalisation Program’, and it looks at the work of Transition Town Greyton in South Africa. It is a fascinating response to the question of “what does Transition look like beyond Europe and the US?” It may well become one of my favourite videos about Transition:
I’d like to announce today one of the biggest changes to Transition Culture since it started back in the dim and distant days of November 2005. Transition Culture has always served as “an evolving exploration of the head, heart and hands of energy descent”, focusing on the ‘edge’ of Transition, bringing new ideas and deepening thinking around the Transition approach. It has sat alongside, but apart from, Transition Network’s website, as my own independent soapbox. In recent months though, as we have been looking in more detail at how Transition Network communicates, and speaking to a range of communications experts, again and again they have told us “this doesn’t make sense”. They have argued the need for a single website that brings together the networking, gathering of resources, and entry-point-into-a-global-network of TransitionNetwork.org and the seat-of-the-pants, edge-exploring and thought-piece-producing Transition Culture. After much soul-searching and discussion, as of mid to late- June 2013, that’s what we’re going to be doing.
On May 13th at 1pm BST, Transition Network and Resilience.org will be hosting a Webinar entitled Local Economic Blueprints: pioneering or pointless? and you are cordially invited to join us (details for how to watch it will be posted here at the end of the week). It will look in more depth at the recently published ‘Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint‘. This innovative process, also being trialled in Hereford and in Brixton, looks at the potential of local economies, trying to quantify the potential economic benefits of taking a more localised approach to economic development. It shows that, in the case of Totnes, a shift of 10% of money spent on food could lead to £2.2 million of increased local economic activity, with the resultant growth in jobs, training and so on.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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