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
Monthly archive for June 2007
Showing results 6 - 10 of 22 for the month of June, 2007.
22 Jun 2007
Ireland is at the end of a very long pipeline when it comes to the oil on which it has become incredibly dependent. It is now one of the most oil dependent nations in the EU, and its Celtic Tiger boom has hugely increased this dependency in direct relation to how the economy has grown. Peak oil is slowly creeping onto the agenda there, with some good articles in the press recently, and 3 days ago, RTE, the nation’s TV station, ran an hour long documentary called ‘Future Shock’ (which you can watch online here), an excellent and chilling programme which did a great job of putting a mirror up to Ireland to ask where its resilience has gone. Hard to imagine anyone watching this and not feeling decidedly unsettled. Great to see, finally, mainstream national TV giving this issue the profile it urgently needs.
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20 Jun 2007
This is slightly old hat now, but I haven’t got round to it yet, so here we go. In the light of the recent coverage here of George Monbiot’s recent assertion in Lampeter that the oil peak is sufficiently far enough away for it not to be a cause for concern, and Chris Vernon’s subsequent response which went through each of his points in considerable detail, it was intriguing to read his column in the Guardian a couple of weeks back now. In it, he takes as his starting point the Government’s recent Energy Review and its belief that “the majority (66%) of UK oil demand is derived from demand for transport fuels which is expected to increase modestly over the medium term. George’s question is “OK… powered by what exactly?”, and in the piece he goes back to the various departments making the assertions and looks at what that complacency is based on. It turns out not very much.
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19 Jun 2007
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux_LFjFeCvg
Alex Munslow, an independent film-maker has produced a great short film about running Open Space, based around the Open Space workshops we ran at the Inaugural Transition Network meeting at Ruskin Mill in Nailsworth. It features Naresh Giangrande of TTT, a clip of my mobile phone going off rather embarrasingly in the middle of my talk, and captures the whole dynamic buzz that Open Space unleashes. Thanks Alex for making it, and for making the whole thing available on the net.
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18 Jun 2007
One of the most exciting initiatives happening as part of Transition Town Totnes is the **Heart and Soul group** who are exploring the psychology of change. Totnes has a relatively high therapist/counsellor per-square-metre ratio compared to other parts of the country, and the H&S group ask the question, “how can the insights from these fields inform and support a community-scale energy descent process?” Their work is fascinating and they are one of the liveliest groups within the TTT umbrella. One of its co-focalisers is Hilary Prentice, and in this article she wrote recently for the Psychotherapists for Social Responsibility’s journal ‘Transformations’, she sets out the nature of the work they are doing.
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15 Jun 2007
At Monday night’s**Food and Farming in Transition** evening, a question was asked to the panel which generated some interesting responses. The question was “What proportion of what needs to be done can be done by the Transition movement?” It was during this evening that Jeremy Leggett, as he does here, used the term “scaleable microcosms of hope” to describe Transition Towns, which I really rather liked.
Read more»
Ireland is at the end of a very long pipeline when it comes to the oil on which it has become incredibly dependent. It is now one of the most oil dependent nations in the EU, and its Celtic Tiger boom has hugely increased this dependency in direct relation to how the economy has grown. Peak oil is slowly creeping onto the agenda there, with some good articles in the press recently, and 3 days ago, RTE, the nation’s TV station, ran an hour long documentary called ‘Future Shock’ (which you can watch online here), an excellent and chilling programme which did a great job of putting a mirror up to Ireland to ask where its resilience has gone. Hard to imagine anyone watching this and not feeling decidedly unsettled. Great to see, finally, mainstream national TV giving this issue the profile it urgently needs. 
