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 31 - 35 of 154 for the category: Politics.
Well, it has been Naomi Klein week here at Transition Culture! Here is the film, beautifully produced by those good folks at nuproject, of Naomi’s talk in Totnes last weekend. Amazing they have turned it around so quickly. Here’s the film … enjoy …
You talked last night about the need for a new coalition in response to climate change, on that could come out fighting… this is the focus of your new book, but I wonder if you are in a position to start sketching out what that might look like?
I’m not sure I’m ready to do that. The only thing I can say is that people, as you know here, people don’t get involved just because it’s climate. People go to a protest because of climate change but they don’t do what they’re doing in Wisconsin – occupying the state capital for almost a month – and this is why politicians feel they can ignore climate issues. Even the people who care, as opposed to the people that deny anything is happening, even the people who care don’t care that much! They always rank it at the bottom of a list of all these other issues. They care more about education, they care more about unemployment, they care more about health.
At the end of Naomi Klein’s two-day visit to Totnes, which included a talk (film of which is still to come) and meetings with many of the key players in Transition Town Totnes, I managed to grab an hour with her for an interview. Here, in two parts (part two tomorrow), is the discussion we had.
You’ve spent two days here in Totnes and met lots of people, and I wondered what your reflections are? What will you take away with you from your time here?
I’m still processing it I guess, but it’s been an amazing two days. What’s most striking to me is just how decentralised this process is and the sense of ownership that so many people have over it. There isn’t that “no I can’t really talk about it”, there’s a tremendous amount of people that have enough confidence to talk about it.
On Wednesday I handed the CD containing the first completed draft of ‘The Transition Companion’ over the Green Books for the editing process to begin. Phew! Been quite a mission (due out in September). Anyway, one of the things that runs through the books is ‘Transition in Action’ sections, drawing together inspiring stories from Transition groups of some of their projects. I’ll post a few of them, starting with this one, from Transition Taunton Deane, written by Chrissy Godfrey… have a good weekend.
“Taunton Transition Town ran an exemplary visioning exercise with their local borough council between July and September 2009, at the request of the council’s strategic director. It brought together almost all the council’s 375 employees, from senior management to plumbers, plus over half of the council’s elected members, to create a vision for a post-oil Taunton Deane.
One of the things with climate change as an issue is that when you’re trying to work out what your position is on climate change, there is a scientific consensus and there’s a body of research there – there’s certain criteria you can use when you come to it to work out if this is valid or not. In terms of economics it’s a grey area, in that there’s so much opinion – so for those of us who are coming through the work that you’ve been doing to trying to get our heads around what’s happening on a global scale, what should be the criteria be, do you think, that we should use when looking at different people’s takes on the economy, as to whether they’re valid or not? What was the criteria that you used when researching on the book?
That’s an interesting question; that’s a very good question.
