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 46 - 50 of 243 for the category: Economics.
Welcome to the monthly round-up of what people are up to doing Transition around the world. Let’s start this month in Spain. Spain recently held its first national Transition conference, which you can read more about here, and you can see Juan del Río’s reflections on it here. Here is a great film about the event which gives a great sense of the energy and dynamism that it tapped into:
There are, as Andrew Simms points out in his most recent blog, two narratives about our economic choices moving forward from here, growth or austerity. Some argue we need austerity in order to get growth, others that we can just cut straight to the growth by printing or borrowing more money. The government recently announced a “massive push for growth“, with £950m being recently allocated for the ‘Regional Growth Fund’ (out of what is expected to be £1.4bn in total), in spite of the fact that money spent so far through the RGF was recently criticised for spending as much as £200,000 to create a single job. One of the key channels for distributing and allocating RGF funds is the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). According to my big-green-book-of-localism the government kindly sent me last year, LEPs are “locally-owned partnerships between local authorities and businesses which will play a central role in determining economic priorities, undertaking activities to drive economic growth and the creation of local jobs”. Yet on closer inspection, LEPs would appear to embody everything that is bereft of vision, imagination and indeed of any of the kind of creativity and thinking that these times demand.
Here, as a stand-alone film clip which you might hopefully put on your Facebook pages, email to everyone you know and generally share in the many ways we now can, is the much-celebrated ‘Leaky Bucket’ animation from ‘In Transition 2.0’. Check out the film’s dedicated website for DVD ordering information and much more. Enjoy.
Here is a list of the books I am working my way through at the moment or have recently finished, I hope they might point you to some recently published books you may find useful and interesting. So, in no particular order:
Michael Mann (2012) The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: dispatches from the front lines. Columbia University Press.
Michael Mann is the principal creator of the (in)famous ‘Hockey Stick’ graph which showed that the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100 years is in excess of historic warming, and clearly linked to increased CO2 emissions. The graph achieved great prominence, as a result of which he became a target of the fossil fuel industry, in particular during the co-ordinated assault on climate science known as ‘Climate Gate’, where emails, including his, were hacked from the University of East Anglia.
I posted the video of this a couple of weeks ago, but I am deeply grateful to Vanessa Kroll who has transcribed it, in case such a thing would be of interest/use to anyone. Here it is:
“Hello. I want to tell you a story which pulls together a lot of what we’ve heard already and looks at what that might look like in the context of one place. And it’s a story which I think can change the world. It’s a story which already is changing the world. It’s the story of my town, Totnes, in Devon. A town of about 8,500 people, midway between Exeter and Plymouth. But before I can tell you the story I really want to tell you about Totnes, I have to get another one out of the way first.
