Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Richard Heinberg hosts a conversation with Rob Hopkins on New Thinking in Transition. The podcast begins with Rob giving an update on what is going on in the Transition movement and introducing the upcoming Transition handbook, and is followed by a Q and A.
We had a great few days at Hope University in Liverpool. This will not be an attempt at a complete document of that event, you will find the most comprehensive record over at the Transition Network’s conference feed. What I am going to share, with links to some of the key pieces of media from that feed, is some of the notes of my reflections at the end of the conference. As the event drew to a close, I went around and asked people for their brief reflections on what they saw as the character unique to this conference in comparison to others. Three words came up again and again, deepening, focus and maturity.
In a Gallup poll released today, Americans chose dilithium crystals as the top choice of fuel to run both cars and power plants, with 84% of Americans choosing the crystals over other options including nuclear, hydrogen, corn ethanol, shale gas, and photovoltaic solar panels. Respondents indicate that dilithium crystals are popular for providing quiet, clean energy, with a proven track record including over seven-hundred twenty-six episodes in four different Star Trek television series.
The university as a repository of knowledge may well have peaked and be rapidly going the same way as slide rulers and mechanical typewriters went. Disappeared; surpassed by faster, better, wider ranging instruments. We need to think of new an more dynamic ways to pass knowledge; we need to stop this weird ritual in which you say things to young people who look at you, but you have no way to know whether they are actually decoding the sounds you are uttering.
We should rather focus on the direct, human contact with a teacher. The relation with a mentor has been fundamental in history and it is likely to remain the master way to attain knowledge. But that happens outside classrooms; it has always been like that, and it always will be.
You are deep in the woods at nightfall and it has started to rain.
You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been ‘volunteered’ for some sustainable-team-building-thingummy-whatsit that you only agreed to because you’ve just applied for a promotion. And now you are bracing yourself for a long uncomfortable night in a make-shift shelter a bit too up close and personal with your three unlikely companions…
The goal of permaculture is to reunite man with nature and man with man through design systems, and here patterns play an important role. Still, patterns can only reunite humans with natural systems and with each other, not with the geometry of the universe. Surely in what I like to call permatecture, better known as biophilic architecture, biotecture or neurotecture, patterns are crucial. But for the creation of wholeness and life we need a whole range of tools.
Writing this book has been a fascinating work. Re-examining the story of “The Limits to Growth” opens up a whole new world that urban legends and propaganda had tried to bury under a layer of lies and misinterpretations. We all have heard of the “mistakes” that the authors of LTG, or their sponsors, the Club of Rome, are said to have made. But LTG was not “wrong”: nowhere in the 1972 book you find the mistakes that are commonly attributed to it.
“Because money talks and BS walks, if the hydrogen economy was an apprentice working for Donald Trump, it would’ve been fired in the first season.” This is just one of the pearls of wisdom from Transition Voice’s new “Snarky Guide to Peak Oil.” It’s got the facts you need to debunk energy myths and the attitude you need to defuse a heated discussion with a smile.
On June 6 and 7, I attended Opal Financial’s Clean and Green Investment Forum. I was invited to take part in a panel on “Green Energy in Emerging and Frontier Markets”. The forum brought together clean tech entrepreneurs and investors as well as a few academics and analysts and proved very stimulating. The overall vibe was one of optimism and opportunity — we’re talking entrepreneurs and investors here.
Dubbed French version of Dubbed French version of the PCI video ‘300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds’. L’histoire humaine des 300 dernières années dont le développement repose sur les énergies fossiles.
We have arrived at a point in our infinitesimally short life on our 4.5 billion-year-old planet at which no part of the natural world remains untouched by human hand. So it might seem perverse that, at this time of peak human interference with natural biological systems, we are now discovering the benefits of getting closer to nature.
The first part of this article, Imagining Sustainability, discussed some of the institutional, social, and psychological barriers in Western societies that “continue to thwart meaningful measurable change”. It also highlighted failings of population-scale information campaigns intended to motivate such change and indicated the better potential for small group and inter-personal approaches that engage deeper values-based motivation in overcoming unsustainability. This second part considers in more detail some small group non-formal education approaches that show potential to achieve and maintain community-level shifts to sustainability.
