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
Here is a short film about a recent event in Totnes, where people involved in TTT who had been in Copenhagen for COP15 and the Klimaforum shared their experiences. Thanks to the good people of the nu-project for making this film.
At this year’s Soil Association conference I was chatting with Mike Small of the Fife Diet in Scotland. He told a story about how a film crew from Sky News came up to Fife to do a news story about their work. While they were filming, Mike chatted to the director and asked him what was the angle on the story. “Well”, said the director, “it’s about a community eating local food”. “Amazing to think that that’s now seen as news!” said Mike. Of course, now such a thing is news, so bizarrely distorted has our food system (and our media, but that’s another story) become. Unfortunately the sprawling monster that actually now feeds most of us isn’t news, but only because it is so well hidden, something that the excellent new film ‘Food Inc’ tries to change.
I am featured in the hallowed pages of New Scientist this week in its Opinion section, under the heading “Rob Hopkins: getting over oil, one town at a time”. The only slight glitch with it is that the otherwise very attentive interviewer misheard my response when she asked when I thought we would see price volatility arising from peak oil. I said “2013”, which she heard as “2030”, thereby placing me alongside Ed Miliband and Malcolm Wicks in terms of making absurd and profoundly optimistic predictions about peak oil. Jeff Rubin would not agree with that… Oh well. Not sure it gives the best picture of what Transition is about, but here it is anyway….
Here’s a great talk by Davie Philip, long-standing master-networker, Transition Ireland Network catalyst and one man catalyst for change, speaking at day two of The New Emergency Conference: Managing Risk and Building Resilience in a Resource Constrained World, held in Dublin last summer by FEASTA. Excellent.
Here is an excellent piece from the Mid-Wales Permaculture Network site, an interview which looks at how Transition initiatives build relationships with other organisations. It is very insightful, and so, with gratitude to Roz Brown and the MWPN, here it is.
Roz Brown in conversation with Dave Prescott of Transition Hay-on-Wye
The need for broad community involvement is frequently recognised by TT groups, and is certainly advocated by the fonder of the movement. But many TTs struggle to identify and work with existing community organisations to forward the process of meeting the global challenges of climate change and peak oil. One TT group in Mid Wales proceeded from the outset to foster this collaboration and work with and through other organistions. In this interview, Dave Prescott tells the story of Transition Hay on Wye.
