2 Oct 2012
The other interview I did at the Degrowth conference in Venice recently was with Silke Helfrich, one of the editors (along with David Bollier) of the excellent recently-published book ‘The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State‘, a collection of 73 articles by activists, academics and project leaders (I wrote one on resilience) on the theme of the commons. I recommend it. Silke gave a fascinating presentation at Degrowth 2012, so one day, after lunch, I caught up with her and asked to her to tell me more. Here, as usual, is the audio should you wish to listen to it, followed by the transcript.
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28 Sep 2012
At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar (my notes from which can be found here). He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others. His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights. Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.
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26 Sep 2012
Beautiful ancient carved doors on the Battistero in Parma.
The next day began with a walk around the city of Ferrara. The core of the city is medieval, and contains some beautiful architecture. One of the things that is initially most striking about Ferrara is the number of bicycles, and the diversity of the people riding bicycles. Ferrara is famous for the levels of cycling. This is aided by the fact that it is a very flat city, but as Pierre told me, also by the fact that cyclists are treated, as he put it, “like sacred cows are in India”, that is, drivers expect them to go anywhere, and do anything, at any time, and so afford them to necessary space on the road. There are no formal cycle lanes so far as I could see, but somehow it all works.
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22 Sep 2012
The theme for today was work. The first plenary session featured four speakers. The first, Gilbert Rist from Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes in Geneva, was a pretty forthright dismissal of economics as it is practiced today. We need, he said, to free ourselves of the dominance that economics has over peoples’ will. There are two reasons why it is fatally flawed. The first is that it is based upon a mechanistic model which makes it impossible for economists to understand present ecological and environmental problems, especially in the biosphere.
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12 Jul 2012
Here is a great new film from Peterborough about a project called ‘The Green Backyard’, which is developing a Transitioney/permaculturey/community resource/educational type thing in urban Peterborough. Beautiful film, with talking bees and everything. The Transition Companion makes an appearance too near the end… thanks to Daryl Mulvihill, who made it, for letting me know about it.
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