I was honoured to be one of the signatories of a letter which was sent to the Queen last month, a response to the British Academy’s letter to her which sought to address her question as to why no-one had seen the economic meltdown coming. Here is the text of the letter in full.
Open Letter to the Queen: 14th August 2009
Your Majesty,
We, the undersigned, noted with interest the letter to Your Majesty of 22nd July 2009 from the British Academy in which they respond to your question about how the current economic meltdown was missed. They talked of a “failure of the collective imagination of many bright people” and a “psychology of denial”.
On May 30th 2009, Transition Glastonbury hosted an event called ‘Somerset in Transition’, which brought together people involved in Transition initiatives from across the county. Speakers included Jeremy Leggett, Shaun Chamberlin and Jacqi Hodgson. A young budding film maker, Jack Thompson-Roylance, from Glastonbury, brought along his camera and made a short film about the day. Here it is. Enjoy, and have a good weekend.
I spent a few days last week at the Sunrise Off the Grid Festival near Shepton Mallet. I had been invited to go and give a talk, and went along with the Hopkins family en masse. It was a small and intimate affair, with some great things; the Transition area in the Tin Village was fantastic, the talk I gave went fine, the weather was mostly kind, and it was all quite relaxed and pleasant. I haven’t been at a festival since 2007’s Big Green Gathering, and there was one key thing I noticed that has changed since then, and which left me feeling very uneasy and with a profound sense of disquiet, so I wanted to give it some attention here. It was the alarming rise of the 2012 doomsters….
How, and how far, will we travel if we make the changes we need to in order to thrive in a carbon constrained society? For a range of interlocking reasons, the conclusion of this paper is that we will be happier, healthier and more resilient if we radically change from our current patterns to ones that fit into a relocalised world. In that world we will travel far less far and fast, overwhelmingly walking, cycling and using public transport.
After many months of Ed Milliband putting himself out there are a Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change that actually gets climate change, finally his big Plan, the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan was unveiled on Wednesday, in a speech in the House of Commons that namechecked Transition Towns and which is the boldest national vision for a low carbon society yet seen. Many others have since pitched in with their thoughts, I thought it might be useful here to offer an analysis from a Transition perspective. In his speech, Milliband said “we know from the Transition Towns movement the power of community action to motivate people..”, clearly an outcome of his attendance as a ‘Keynote Listener’ at the Transition Network conference in May. So how does the Plan measure up, and does it actually advance what Transition initiatives and the wider relocalisation movement are doing?
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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I was honoured to be one of the signatories of a letter which was sent to the Queen last month, a response to the British Academy’s letter to her which sought to address her question as to why no-one had seen the economic meltdown coming. Here is the text of the letter in full.
