Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Monthly archive for December 2005
Showing results 16 - 20 of 28 for the month of December, 2005.
9 Dec 2005
Last night in Cork city, the **Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan** was awarded Cork Environmental Forum’s prestigious Roll of Honour Award. The award was presented by the Mayor of Kinsale, Cllr. Tomas O’Brien to the Principal of Kinsale Further Education College, Mr. John Thuillier. The event was attended by many people, including Practical Sustainability students past and present. I will post a more detailed account of the evening when I receive one, but for now here are some photos, taken by Graham Strouts (thanks Graham!) and from the CEF press release.
Mr. John Thuillier recieves the award from Kinsale Mayor, Cllr. Tomas O’Brian at the Firkin Crane Theatre, Cork.
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9 Dec 2005
As someone currently studying a PhD in a mainstream University after many years teaching using creative methods, I am only too aware of its shortcomings. The teaching is quite formal, and the emphasis is purely on the academic, not on rooting any of it in daily life. Sustainability and talk of education for life beyond oil is almost non-existant. The **Practical Sustainability** course I created in Kinsale was as close as I could get to the permaculture course I would always like to have done myself. In the context of mainstream Irish education it took many risks and broke much new ground, and its success far exceeded any expectations we may have had at the outset.
Imagine though, a University that you would study with anywhere in the world, that supported activists and earth-repairers, was able to issue Batchelors and Masters level degrees, and was built on principles of permaculture and the manifestation of a post-carbon world.
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8 Dec 2005
In recent posts I have been chewing over the idea of visioning, and its central importance to Energy Descent work. As part of a presentation I am preparing for a talk next week, I hunted down various images from the 1930s of how people then thought we would be living today. One of the best is a character called **Captain Future.**
Captain Future (Wizard of Science) is clearly a guy you don’t want to mess with. He’s powerful and strong, with a funny gun thing that hopefully for him, given all the aliens he has to deal with, is more powerful than it looks, especially compared to things in films nowadays, such as the Men in Black’s guns which I suspect I would probably struggle to lift off the floor. He has some great clunky space boots which presumably allow him to fly. He has
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8 Dec 2005
**The End of Suburbia**. I’m sure that most of you reading this have seen this film already. If you hadn’t you probably wouldn’t be reading this. I tend to assume that everyone has seen it, but actually most people haven’t. I organised a number of public screenings of it in West Cork when I lived there, it is always a very powerful experience seeing how people react to it. One thing that has struck me is that when I first showed it people were deeply affected and upset, it was quite a thing listening to people’s shock and distress after the film. Now when I show it people are really inspired and want to do stuff, nowhere near so much upset and shock. It is still the same film, so I can only really assume that the people have changed in that time.
For many years, most people I met in the permaculture movement could trace their involvement back to
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7 Dec 2005
Here is an exercise that I do with students on permaculture courses. I always thought that it came from Skye and Robin Clanfield’s indispensable book ‘The Manual of Teaching Permaculture Creatively’, but just looking for it now I can’t find it. I alway find it a very powerful exercise. It comes at the end of a session on urban sustainability that will have looked at a range of strategies for making the town more sustainable and is called **’Urban Tour Guides”**. I take the students to a housing estate somewhere near the college, or more specifically to a crossroads between a few different areas of housing. I divide the group into smaller groups of 4-6, and give each group a topic, such as waste, water, energy, food, community or building.
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