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
Archive for “Culture” category
Showing results 151 - 155 of 183 for the category: Culture.
15 Jan 2010
I read with interest John Michael Greer’s recent post, The Costs of Community, and then Sharon Astyk’s response, On the Problem of Community and I wanted to add some thoughts to the flow. Here is a very quick summary of the debate thus far… Greer’s basic argument is that the way politics used to work was that citizens formed themselves into groups and those groups into movements and that was what brought the pressure to bear to make things happen. Today, we are so atomised and isolated that this doesn’t happen, due, in part, to our preciously-guarded sense of autonomy, our lack of time, and our lack of enthusiasm for putting in the work that actually building communities entails. Rebuilding community, he argues, “requires “sacrificing some of the autonomy so many Americans guard jealously”.
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21 Dec 2009
The Western Morning News is a daily paper that covers the South West of England. Often its editorials denounce the idea of windfarms, and its letter pages are often full of climate sceptics. All the more heartening that the following editorial appeared in today’s paper, alongside a very good news piece about TTT’s DECC award. An editorial like this would have been unimaginable a couple of years ago, it is fascinating how fast things are moving. I must say though that I have lived in Totnes for nearly 5 years now, and have yet to see a carved bar of soap (see below)!
“The South Devon town of Totnes has come in for a fair bit of criticism over the years as the South West capital of the ‘alternative culture’. Listen to the jeers of its critics and you would think the average resident of the TQ9 postcode was a sandal-wearing, crystal-gazing soap carver subsisting entirely on brown rice and organic parsnips.
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21 Dec 2009
So Copenhagen has been and gone, with no meaningful agreement being reached, and now the politicians and lobbyists have headed home having failed to do anything meaningful to address this staggeringly pressing challenge. Hugo Chavez came up with the quote of the fortnight when he observed “if the climate was a bank, they would already have saved it”. The gathering of the environmental/climate change movement in the Klimaforum with its dedicated bringing together of green luminaries and activists failed to have any meaningful impact on the proceedings, as did the mass street protests, designed to shame delegates into meaningful action and to draw a line in the sand. In short, the responses that the alternative movement/protest culture/social justice movement usually rolls into action when such events take place, didn’t work. So, might we do things differently next time?
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16 Dec 2009
This report comes from Ben Brangwyn of Transition Network, who is out in Copenhagen flying the Transition flag while avoiding getting teargassed.
I’m finding that Copenhagen has a very intense and charged atmosphere, and largely positively so. Transition Network and the transition ideas have a good visibility over here, with involvement in at least 7 workshops and a steady stream (and occasional tsunami) of people from all over the world to our stand in the Expo area, interviews with several of the excellent broadcasting outfits (PositiveTV and ClimateTV) and a screening of “In Transition 1.0” in the main hall at KlimaForum.
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I read with interest John Michael Greer’s recent post, The Costs of Community, and then Sharon Astyk’s response, On the Problem of Community and I wanted to add some thoughts to the flow. Here is a very quick summary of the debate thus far… Greer’s basic argument is that the way politics used to work was that citizens formed themselves into groups and those groups into movements and that was what brought the pressure to bear to make things happen. Today, we are so atomised and isolated that this doesn’t happen, due, in part, to our preciously-guarded sense of autonomy, our lack of time, and our lack of enthusiasm for putting in the work that actually building communities entails. Rebuilding community, he argues, “requires “sacrificing some of the autonomy so many Americans guard jealously”.
