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
Let’s start this month’s round up in Australia. Transition Sydney also recently held an event about social enterprise and reviving local economies through resilience-building, entitled the ‘Living Economies Forum’, with a great range of speakers. Here is the poster. One of them was Michael Shuman, and here is his excellent talk, called “Building Resilient Local Economies through Local Investment”:
I am indebted, I think, to Massimiliano Rupalti, aka. Rupo, who I met on my recent trip to Italy, who just sent me his grandmother’s recipe for making snail soup. Following my recent post about The Four Slugs of the Apocalypse, it offers a useful way to turn a problem into a solution. I am assured that this is quite delicious, although personally the final line of the recipe, “keep cooking for at least an hour or till the sauce becomes dense”, makes me feel somewhat queasy. If you try it, do let us know how it was. Thanks Rupo.
Snails soup ‘alla urbaniese’ (grandma’s recipe)
Once gathered the snails (only big ones) we need to leave them in a closed basket for at least 10 days and not more than 15 days.
The other interview I did at the Degrowth conference in Venice recently was with Silke Helfrich, one of the editors (along with David Bollier) of the excellent recently-published book ‘The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State‘, a collection of 73 articles by activists, academics and project leaders (I wrote one on resilience) on the theme of the commons. I recommend it. Silke gave a fascinating presentation at Degrowth 2012, so one day, after lunch, I caught up with her and asked to her to tell me more. Here, as usual, is the audio should you wish to listen to it, followed by the transcript.
New Economics Foundation’s ‘100 Months’ campaign today reaches its midway point. It was launched in August 2008 based on the understanding that the time that remains to us to avoid the likelihood of runaway climate change is limited, and based on the science at the time, there was closing window of opportunity to do something meaningful about it. 50 people were asked to write, in 50 words, their response to the question “so what needs to be done in the time we have left?” Here’s mine:
“As well as international/national action, we also need to put strategic economic localisation at the heart of national economic policy, making local food, community-owned energy, genuine local democracy, a culture of entrepreneurship and local investment for local benefit the foundation of a low-carbon, resilient economy. And it should be thrilling”.
Here is the video of the event on the opening evening of Degrowth 2012 in Venezia (which I have blogged about extensively in previous posts), when I shared the stage with Serge Latouche, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomas among others. My talk starts at 1:48:20:
