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
Showing results 16 - 20 of 474 for the category: Climate Change.
We start this month’s round-up in Tooting in London. Transition Town Tooting recently posted this film about their Foodival last year. Foodival is an annual event which celebrates what local food means in this diverse urban context:
Today’s guest post is from Naresh Giangrande, and explores the story of the Totnes Community Wind Farm, which is reaching a crucial stage in its planning application for two wind turbines near Totnes. He explores how sometimes, it appears, even unprecedented levels of community support just aren’t enough, and how it appears local planners have decided the view from one church and a listed building outweigh the economic and community benefits, not to mention the benefits to future generations:
Yes the small sleepy town of Totnes in South Devon is again in the latest, the hottest front line of cultural dissonance, this time over wind turbines. The Totnes Renewable Energy Society (TRESOC) is seeking planning permission to erect two 2.3 megawatt wind turbines in the best location for wind energy generation in South Devon, itself one of the windiest part of England. Some people love ’em some hate ’em (wind turbines that is), and we are well endowed with many in both camps.
I am very honoured to be able to present to you an interview I conducted recently with climate scientist Michael Mann. Michael is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC). He is author of recently published ‘The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars’ which I can highly recommend. In our interview we discussed the Hockey Stick, the state of play of climate science, and how it was being in the eye of the ‘Climategate’ storm of a couple of years ago. Here is the interview as a podcast, or below is the transcript, lightly edited for brevity.
Today we have a guest post from Kate de Selincourt of the AECB, the Sustainable Building Association:
Are you keen on encouraging sustainable and resilient building in your community – and would you like to have some good chats about it? If you have an AECB group nearby you have an untapped resource. Transition members who are involved with building and energy initiatives are being invited to come along to a local meeting of the AECB (Sustainable Building Association) and take advantage of the common ground between the two organisations.
What’s your sense at the moment of the movement of people around the world who are doing this kind of work, whether it’s Transition or your work or all the various other kind of things like it? This bottom-up, community-focused sense that the new economy that’s actually going to be able to sustain us needs to be run very very differently from the one we have at the moment which is failing so many people wretchedly at this point. What’s your sense of the state of health, where are we do you think?
There’s this common link that you and I have, which is climate change. Climate change, to me, is the over arching context of everything we deal with on the planet at this moment in time, and henceforth for the rest of our lives, our children’s lives and on into the future. It’s now become the 800 pound gorilla in the room, whether our politicians are able to act on it or not. Eventually they will, at different levels, and they already are at some levels, but as Thomas Friedman, who writes for the New York Times, says “Nature bats last”.
