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
8 Dec 2005
**The End of Suburbia**. I’m sure that most of you reading this have seen this film already. If you hadn’t you probably wouldn’t be reading this. I tend to assume that everyone has seen it, but actually most people haven’t. I organised a number of public screenings of it in West Cork when I lived there, it is always a very powerful experience seeing how people react to it. One thing that has struck me is that when I first showed it people were deeply affected and upset, it was quite a thing listening to people’s shock and distress after the film. Now when I show it people are really inspired and want to do stuff, nowhere near so much upset and shock. It is still the same film, so I can only really assume that the people have changed in that time.
For many years, most people I met in the permaculture movement could trace their involvement back to
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7 Dec 2005
Here is an exercise that I do with students on permaculture courses. I always thought that it came from Skye and Robin Clanfield’s indispensable book ‘The Manual of Teaching Permaculture Creatively’, but just looking for it now I can’t find it. I alway find it a very powerful exercise. It comes at the end of a session on urban sustainability that will have looked at a range of strategies for making the town more sustainable and is called **’Urban Tour Guides”**. I take the students to a housing estate somewhere near the college, or more specifically to a crossroads between a few different areas of housing. I divide the group into smaller groups of 4-6, and give each group a topic, such as waste, water, energy, food, community or building.
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7 Dec 2005
It was only a matter of time really. We’ve had the Climate Change Movie, The Day After Tomorrow, and now here come the Peak Oil movies. Thanks to the excellent Powering Down blog site for drawing my attention to three forthcoming movies, due for release either on US television or cinemas. I wrote in an earlier blog about our collective inability to vision the kind of future we actually want, and so end up stumbling blindly forward into whatever we get. Watch the trailers for these three films and have a think about it. To what extent is this a self fulfilling prophecy?
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6 Dec 2005
A new species, discovered recently in Borneo, could be under threat by the growing European biodiesel industry. The cat-like animal, which actually when I first saw the picture I thought was a minature brontosaurus until I noticed that its ‘neck’ was actually its tail, is thought to be a kind of cat. The BBC reported on it this morning in an article called ‘New mammal’ seen in Borneo. It turns out however that the creature is already at risk due to deforestation of Borneo’s indigienous forests in order for the planting of palm oil to feed Europe’s rapidly expanding demand for biofuels to replace diminishing oil imports.
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6 Dec 2005
**David Holmgren** is the co-founder of permaculture, originating the concept in the late 1970s when David was Bill’s student at a progressive university in Australia. For many years, David had been overshadowed by Bill’s outgoing and occasionally outrageous character; while Bill toured the world inspiring many people and infuriating a few more, David stayed at home, home-schooled his son, built his house, planted his garden, walked his talk. With the recent publication of his latest book, ‘Permaculture – principles and pathways beyond sustainability’, David has begun to reclaim his place at the heart
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**The End of Suburbia**. I’m sure that most of you reading this have seen this film already. If you hadn’t you probably wouldn’t be reading this. I tend to assume that everyone has seen it, but actually most people haven’t. I organised a number of public screenings of it in West Cork when I lived there, it is always a very powerful experience seeing how people react to it. One thing that has struck me is that when I first showed it people were deeply affected and upset, it was quite a thing listening to people’s shock and distress after the film. Now when I show it people are really inspired and want to do stuff, nowhere near so much upset and shock. It is still the same film, so I can only really assume that the people have changed in that time. 
