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
1 Jun 2011
The Fox pub's football team, circa 1911. Apologies for the quality of the photo, Peter Cross took it on his phone!
My thanks to Peter Cross for sending this in. Here is a fascinating taste of how football worked before the age of cheap oil. Football today is hard to imagine without its huge carbon footprint and its dependence on dazzlingly sophisticated communications technology. Man Utd’s climate change-aware defender Rio Ferdinand, recently said “we travel week in week out. We’re in France one week, Spain the next. How do you get around that? I’m yet to be told – unless you can enlighten me?” Well here’s a story that could contribute to that conversation.
This is a picture of the football team of the Fox public house in Felpham near Bognor Regis, in West Sussex in 1911. In front of the team is a football on top of a box. The box was used to transport a pigeon to away matches. According to Peter, at the end of the game the result was written on a small piece of paper and sent by pigeon to the Bognor Regis Observer. A strategy that Rio might like to adopt as he attempts to interest Man Utd in reducing their carbon footprint?
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30 May 2011
This post is a response to Charlotte DuCann’s beautiful and heartfelt post over on the Transition Norwich blog arguing that Transition needs to more explicitly embrace activism. It is wonderful to see, whether through that blog, through Transition Voice, or through the emerging social reporting project, new voices coming through in the Transition blogosphere. Charlotte speaks powerfully to the split that some of those engaged in Transition feel, that they almost need to keep their activism ‘in the closet’ in order to remain engaged. She states that she sees her post as a ‘working document’, and invites reflections, so here are a few of mine.
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30 May 2011
Gathering for the Unleashing of Transition Albany in the US. Pic: Dorothy Brown.
Welcome to the May monthly roundup of what’s happening in the world of Transition. We hope this issue will lift your spirits and inspire you to continue working within your communities – wherever they may be! We start with Kinsale in Ireland which was the first ever Transition Town in the world! Kinsale’s plans for a bio-waste project is leading the way for Ireland’s first community run, eco-friendly anaerobic digester (AD). The project has recently been boosted by a grant of €37,500 from the Department of the Environment under its Rethink, Recycle, Remake (Rx3).
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26 May 2011
I am currently reading Carl Sagan’s excellent book ‘The Demon-haunted World: science as a candle in the dark’, which I picked up for a song in a second hand bookshop when I was last in London. Although published in 1996, it is as relevant to today as when it was published. Its focus is on the need for critical thinking and for a grounding in science, and it contains a great chapter called ‘The Fine Art of Baloney Detection’. Here he sets out what not to do when trying to assess the validity of an argument, and common ways that people make flawed arguments. One of those is creating a straw man, which he defines as “caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack “. Having spent Monday morning debating on ABC Radio in Australia with someone who has done just this, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on being a straw man.
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23 May 2011
The ‘In Transition 2.0’ team have had a sneak preview of Rob’s now-complete manuscript and meetings are well underway to co-ordinate this huge film effort. We’re consulting with various Transition bods to ensure we use all the resources at our disposal and create a film that reflects the diverse goings on in Transition around the world. Some contributors from the first film have been in touch to get involved with this second one and lots of other interesting people have responded to my first call out.
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