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
The amazing thing about TED is the speaker you have never heard of who just blows you away. Itay Talgam did that for me. This is one of the greatest talks I have ever seen, and now the film is available. Should be compulsory viewing on Transition Training! Settle down and enjoy….
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.
Popped the radio on on Sunday afternoon, and heard an amazing 15 minute programme called ‘The Runaway Train’. It tells the storyof an event in northern Canada in 1987, when railwayman Wesley MacDonald loaded up a train of 50 cars of iron ore, but the brakes failed and before he knew it, he was the only person aboard a runaway train. The discussions between himself and the rail traffic controller about whether to stay on the train or to jump were recorded on tape. The programme is made up of interviews with many of those involved and you can listen to it here for the next 6 days. In some ways it has no relation to usual Transition Culture-related issues, but there is something about how people come together in times of adversity, and the depth of emotion this programme captures, that suggests that as we inhabit our own collective runaway train, the notion that it will inevitably bring out the worst in each of us is at least debatable.
The first of the forthcoming Transition Books series, ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’ was launched in a wonderful event on Tuesday night at the Hub in King’s Cross in London. The evening was more than just a celebration of the book, it was a celebration of local food in general. Tamzin had been laid low with flu in the days running up to the event, so even though she had recovered somewhat, I was drafted in as a last minute compere.
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.
