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
2 Feb 2007
If a developer wants to take perfectly good light industrial area and replace it with a new urban centre, on a floodplain, with buildings up to 6 stories high, on average 4 stories, with 750 residential units, a shopping centre, cinema complex and so on, how should the community respond? They could write angry letters, organise a protest, rally people to fight against it. Or, perhaps, there might be another way to approach it. This is happening in Lewes, and people are not happy about it. The Transition Town Lewes group have come up with a great way of responding to this, with a positive vision of how the site could be. Based on Tom Atlee’s idea of a Futures Gazette, they have written a newspaper article (by the brilliantly named journalist ‘Mavis Happen’) from an edition of the local paper in 2017. Read on…
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1 Feb 2007
**Vandana Shiva** is the most extraordinary speaker on environmental issues I have ever heard. Period. It was entirely appropriate that she should deliver the keynote lecture on Taking The Oil Out of Our Food which she did very powerfully and is essential listening. You can now hear the podcast at the Soil Association website. During a previous panel discussion, I asked her the question “there are now communities around the UK looking at how to relocalise their food systems in response to peak oil, but they are working against the cultural trends and the direction most see as logical. Do you have any advice for such groups?”. Here is a direct transcript of her reply;
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31 Jan 2007
At great risk of opening up the whole issue again, I wanted to share a quote with you from Vandana’s talk at the Soil Association conference that for me summed up the whole doomer/powerdown debate that was flying around on **Transition Culture**, the ever-indispensible Energy Bulletin and other places recently. In response to a question during the debate of which she was a part, she said **”the uncertainty of our times is no reason to be certain about hopelessness”**. I think that in those thirteen words she summarised everything I had been trying to say in the various pieces I wrote on the subject. I’ll leave it at that. Just for the record, if I have a headstone when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I would like that written on it.
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30 Jan 2007
**Take to the fields – the tipping point of global oil production will be accompanied by a dire energy shock, and we will have to redefine the concept of farming.
Jeremy Leggett.
The Guardian, Monday 29th January.**
On Friday and Saturday last week, a potentially historic meeting took place in the rather unpromising location of the CIA, otherwise known as the Cardiff International Arena. Britain’s organic farming community gathered en masse for the annual meeting of the Soil Association, and their theme was peak oil and farming in the post-petroleum era.
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30 Jan 2007
The Soil Association conference generated a lot of interest around the subject of peak oil and relocalisation. Some very good pieces appeared in various media, one of the better ones in the Welsh paper, the Western Mail. It is reproduced below….
**Why life after oil will be better – by Molly Watson.**
Experts are predicting that in as little as 12 months’ time our global supplies of oil will start to diminish. Demand will exceed supply, prices will rise, and suddenly all of the things we take for granted like commuting from Swansea to Cardiff, buying roses in February and holidaying abroad will be out of the question.
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If a developer wants to take perfectly good light industrial area and replace it with a new urban centre, on a floodplain, with buildings up to 6 stories high, on average 4 stories, with 750 residential units, a shopping centre, cinema complex and so on, how should the community respond? They could write angry letters, organise a protest, rally people to fight against it. Or, perhaps, there might be another way to approach it. This is happening in Lewes, and people are not happy about it. The Transition Town Lewes group have come up with a great way of responding to this, with a positive vision of how the site could be. Based on Tom Atlee’s idea of a Futures Gazette, they have written a newspaper article (by the brilliantly named journalist ‘Mavis Happen’) from an edition of the local paper in 2017. Read on…
