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 “Resilience” category
Showing results 341 - 345 of 401 for the category: Resilience.
5 Nov 2009
A biomass boiler in Sala, Sweden.
(Naresh Giangrande recently returned from a Transition Training tour of Sweden, here is a short report about his trip).
I spent a intensely satisfying afternoon with the students of a Folks school in Gotenberg exploring how to tell positive stories of the future especially around climate change. We explored topics like how to tell stories that changed peoples heart and mind, how to tell stories about systems, resilience, and my favourite ‘how do you tell stories about the future’. They invited me to join them because the course tutor had heard of my visit and she thought that having someone from a positive movement about climate action would stimulate and inspire students. It certainly inspired me to work with switched on and passionate teenagers!
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3 Nov 2009
I have been following with interest the discussions surrounding Alex Steffen’s piece at WorldChanging in which he critiques Transition. I am honoured that someone so widely respected as a writer on sustainability issues saw fit to engage in discussions around Transition , but, as a critique of Transition, it leaves a lot to be desired. It is a confusing piece in which, in spite of Alex’s protestations in the comments thread to have read everything about Transition that is out there, seems to have somewhat missed the point. I’ll go through some of Alex’s main points, but an overall reflection is that it appears to me that what Alex does is to describe Transition as something it isn’t, criticise it for being that, and then propose something to replace Transition which is actually what Transition was all along. An odd approach. Carolyn Baker has already posted an articulate response to Alex’s piece, but here’s mine.
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21 Oct 2009
The latest edition of Resurgence is timed to coincide with the Copenhagen talks, and looks at resilience as a key aspect of the climate change debates. Here is the article I wrote for it.
Resilience Thinking. Why ‘resilience thinking’ is a crucial missing piece of the climate-change jigsaw and why resilience is a more useful concept than sustainability: by Rob Hopkins.
Resilience; “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks”
In July 2009, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband unveiled the government’s UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, a bold and powerful statement of intent for a low-carbon economy in the UK. It stated that by 2020 there would be a five-fold increase in wind generation, feed-in tariffs for domestic energy generation, and an unprecedented scheme to retrofit every house in the country for energy efficiency.
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14 Oct 2009
The other day I had a short tour of some of the Totnes nut tree plantings with Wendy Stayte who runs the Totnes nut tree planting scheme, initiated by Transition Town Totnes 3 years ago. Over 100 trees have now been planted, most of them having a ‘guardian’, whose job it is to keep an eye on them. In one park, a line of 3 almond trees, it turned out, have begun to bear fruit! Nestled on a south facing slope at the end of the park on raised ground away from the flying footballs that had damaged a couple of other trees planted there, the trees had grown well, and now here were the first actual nuts! Well it felt like a moment of history to me.
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9 Oct 2009
It’s been a fascinating few days. Early in the week, Nate Hagens and Sharon Astyk were suggesting the perhaps the term ‘peak oil’ has outlived its usefulness, given that we have almost certainly peaked, and that the peak oil movement needs to shift its focus. It echoed something I wrote a while ago, likening ASPO and the wider peak oil movement to a Loch Ness Monster Society, dedicated to establishing the existence of this fabled creature. They organise conferences, scientific searches of the loch, write papers and journals, and then one day, an entire, intact Loch Ness Monster washes up on the shore. Then what? They have no reason to exist any longer, their whole raison d’etre vanishes overnight.
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