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 “Politics” category
Showing results 56 - 60 of 154 for the category: Politics.
9 Jun 2010
Just finished reading, on the train home from the talk I gave last night in Godalming, the draft of Alexis Rowell’s forthcoming book, “Communities, Councils and a Low Carbon Future: what we can do if governments won’t”. It is shaping up to be an excellent immersion in how to engage with your local authority, in what is already happening in Councils across the country, and what it looks like when Councils and Transition groups work together. Anyway, for his book, we need to gather as many good pictures of Transition groups and local Councils interacting. If you have any pictures of events you have done with your local Council, posters, trainings, times when Council representatives have spoken at your events, and so on. Anything you’ve got, we’d love to see it. Email them to rob@transitionculture.org, and I’ll forward them to Alexis…. Thanks!
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27 May 2010
So the Queen’s Speech has set out the policy priorities for the new government, but were the policies announced a cop-out or do they set out a wartime mobilisation scale of response to climate change and peak oil? These reflections are based on the article about the speech that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian. Plans include setting up a green investment bank, which will make loans available to households for energy efficiency measures and renewable energy installations, the ‘pay-as-you-save’ scheme initially proposed by Ed Miliband. The exact amount of the loans that will be available has not yet been stated, although the Guardian speculates that it could be as much as £15,000. This is a great development, but I wonder if it could yet be taken further? How would DECC respond, for example, if a Transition group were able to get 100 people to take out loans of £15,000 each and club it together as £1.5million in order to finance a community-owned ESCO, an energy company designed to be owned by and financially benefit the community?
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19 May 2010
This post was prompted by an email from Brian Davey on behalf of the Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) Group in Transition Nottingham. The subject under discussion is EDAPs (or Community Resilience Plans… or whatever you want to call them), and how one does them for cities, or even if one does them for cities. Their questions give me an opportunity to reflect on the Totnes EDAP process, and to explore some emergent aspects of Transition, especially in the urban context. The Nottingham group have given me permission to reprint their initial email in full, so I will start with that, and then move on to my reflections on the points they raise. This post is as much an invitation for your comments and thoughts as anything else….
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22 Apr 2010
On Wednesday night in Totnes, TTT held its Election Hustings event. By the day of the election, there will have been 7 hustings events in the area, most of them following the traditional format of candidates in a row being asked questions by the audience. TTT wanted to do things a bit differently, so a different format was devised in an attempt to get away from the usual experience of such events, and it worked very well.
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31 Mar 2010
**A Guest Post by Naresh Giangrande**
It was with some fear and trepidation that Alexis Rowell, a Camden Borough councillor and the author of the upcoming Transition Guide to Local Authorities (LA), and I arrived in a deeply conservative part of the country, Norfolk, to do a day with them on peak oil, climate change and the Transition town model and practice. For those that don’t know it, Norfolk is a stunningly beautiful part of the country which is partly comprised of two areas, the Norfolk Broads, a large inland waterway system and the Fens (see pics below) which is partly wild and very intensively farmed, it being one of the UKs most productive farmland. It is also largely at sea level therefore at the hard edge of climate change policy. As the Helen and Newton Harrison’s work, Green House Britain makes clear, a 5 metre rise in sea levels will mean a significant part of East Anglia would be under water.
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