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 61 - 65 of 684 for the category: Localisation.
Here is a great piece from Al Jazeera about various Transition things underway in Brixton: the Brixton Pound, Brixton Energy and the Edible Bus Stop project. One of the best TV pieces about Transition anyone has done yet I think…
About 4 weeks ago, I had the honour of interviewing Charles Eisenstein, author of ‘Sacred Economics’ while he was in the UK visiting Schumacher College to teach a course there for a week. I had to admit before we began the interview that I have yet to read his book, in spite of the number of people I know who have insisted that I really ought to. I decided to see this as an opportunity though, given that most people who will be reading this won’t have read it either, thereby sharing my starting point of near-complete ignorance. I think it kind of works. He was charming and thoughtful, and you can either hear the podcast of the interview below, or read the transcript below that.
Today we start a series of short posts to preview different aspects of the 2012 Transition Network conference (tickets now on sale!). We’ll be talking to different people who will be presenting workshops and other aspects of the conference, and hearing in their own words their plans and hopes for what they’ll be bringing to the event. Today it’s Shane Hughes of the REconomy Project, who talks about the REconomy Day and about the workshop that he and Fiona Ward will be presenting on the first day of the main conference (just click to play).
He says:
“We want to present these trigger points, these tipping points, that we’re coming close to in terms of the economic evolution that we are going through, the evolving new economy, and we want to get people excited about the fact that there are these oncoming tipping points that if we work towards these new features of a new economy could start to become, in the same light as climate change has runaway unstoppable tipping points, we believe the positive new economy has these runaway tipping points and we want to highlight them and discuss them”.
I was recently in Santander, a major port city on the northern Spanish coast. While my kids were waking up in the hotel, my wife and youngest son went out in search of breakfast. Bereft of a map, we wandered in search of some fruit, and some pastries perhaps? Eventually, glancing round a street corner, I spotted what looked like it might be the corner of a market stall. On closer inspection, it turned out we had stumbled across one of the most remarkable food markets I have ever had the pleasure to wander around, El Mercado de la Esperanza, or ‘The Market of Hope’.
In 2007 we published Simon Fairlie’s seminal study “Can Britain Feed Itself?” (which originally appeared in The Land journal), the first study since 1975 to ask that question. In spite of being a back of the envelope stab at the question, the study proved hugely provocative (although sadly not in government circles) resulting in a number of “Can [insert name of place] feed itself” studies and seemingly endless debates about whether it could be done in a way that pleased vegans, meat eaters, vegetarians and so on. Five years later, The Land, the journal that published Fairlie’s original study, has published “Can Britain Farm Itself?” (which you can download as a pdf here or read online here), written by Ed Hamer, smallholder and writer (a noble combination). The question it explores is the extent to which agriculture, if approached in a different way, could create land-based employment in a time in desperate need of employment opportunities. It is a fascinating piece of work.
