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
Every February, the Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa, California, brew a beer called ‘Pliny the Younger’. Nothing too remarkable about that you might think. But what would you say if I told you that their brewing this one particular beer leads to $4.88 million in economic impact on the local economy? Craft beer as economic development? Absolutely. Read on.
I was working in my greenhouse last week, planting out lettuce seedlings with the kind of grounded but slightly heady optimism that starts to course through a gardener’s veins at this time of year, and listening to the radio. The news came through that the jury in the Hillsborough Inquiry had ruled that the 96 people that died were ‘unlawfully killed’. I felt the same powerful emotional reaction I had felt 6 years earlier, around the same time of year, when I had also heard the findings of the Savile Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, a sense that a vast, gaping wrong had been righted, that a lie told for so long could no longer be told.
In October 2013, Peter Lipman and I travelled to the US, initially to be part of the Environmental Grantmakers’ Association annual retreat, but also to visit a number of Transition groups. I had, at the time, not flown for 7 years, having vowed not to fly again having seen ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006. The “to fly or not to fly” issue is one we had debated previously too (the comment thread is especially good). The decision to fly to the US was the result of a huge amount of soul-searching, captured in a blog at the time. In it I wrote:
As part of our theme of ‘International’, we have been looking at the UK’s forthcoming EU in/out referendum from different perspectives. We thought it might be interesting to get a view on it from Juliet Davenport of Good Energy. How might a Brexit vote affect the push for a renewable energy system in this country?
The rise of the film ‘Demain‘ appears unstoppable. Viewed in France now by almost a million people, winner of the Cesar award for Best Documentary, lined up for release in at least 30 other countries, the film has been received with standing ovations, and has inspired many people to roll their sleeves up and do things everywhere it has screened. As we will hear next week, it has also proved the most amazing platform for Transition groups. Last week he attended, with co-producer Melanie Laurent, a screening of the film at the UN in New York where David Nabarro, Advisor to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, told them, “this film should be part of the training of all the political leaders of this planet.” We spoke to him recently, and asked him to tell us more about himself:
