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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 September 2012
Showing results 6 - 10 of 33 for the month of September, 2012.
22 Sep 2012
The theme of Saturday, my last day at Degrowth2012 (although it is continuing tomorrow also) was ‘democracy’. I arrived late for the opening session, due to having been woken several times in the night by a very persistent mosquito, and after I had lovingly posted my write-up of yesterday, for you dear reader, I was running a little bit late. So I missed Marco Deriu, and arrived half way through the talk by Salvor Nordal, Chair of the Iceland Constitutional Council and the University of Iceland. She had been speaking about how the financial crash of 4 years ago in Iceland has led to a very creative process of reimagining democracy in Iceland.
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22 Sep 2012
The theme for today was work. The first plenary session featured four speakers. The first, Gilbert Rist from Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes in Geneva, was a pretty forthright dismissal of economics as it is practiced today. We need, he said, to free ourselves of the dominance that economics has over peoples’ will. There are two reasons why it is fatally flawed. The first is that it is based upon a mechanistic model which makes it impossible for economists to understand present ecological and environmental problems, especially in the biosphere.
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20 Sep 2012
The theme of the first full day of ‘The Third International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity’ in Venice was ‘Commons’. For me there were a couple of key highlights of the day, so I will give a thumbnail of all the talks today, but more detail on the highlights. As with my notes from yesterday, the following is compiled from my notes, and so are entirely fallible. Apologies to any of the speakers if I have got their message wrong. The first speaker was Gianni Tamino of the University of Padova who argued that in the context of depleting resources, the commons are essential for living, we can’t postpone the end of growth.
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20 Sep 2012
I’m in Venice at the 2012 Degrowth conference. I’ve never been to Venice before, it is really quite an extraordinary place. Even in the rain. It took me 17 bleary hours on various trains, but that was time well spent. This is the third Degrowth conference, and it has brought together people from far and wide, with its theme of ‘The Great Transition: degrowth as a passage of civilisation’. The conference started this afternoon, in the Teatro Malibran, a beautiful old theatre.
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19 Sep 2012
Transition folks from around the world gathered last weekend at Battersea Arts Centre for the 6th annual Transition Network conference. In a week when the Arctic ice reached its smallest ever extent, scientists warned that the world’s weather could be on the verge of running amok and it was suggested that Saudi Arabia, always meant to be the ‘swing producer’ on whom the rest of the world could depend for reliable oil supplies, may become a net importer of oil by 2030, the theme of the conference was, appropriately, ‘Building resilience in extraordinary times’. Unlike previous conferences which had spanned two, perhaps three days, this was, in effect, a 6 day ‘Festival of Transition’, and it turned out to be an extraordinary event which deeply affected those attending.
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