rob hopkins

From Rob Hopkin's blog at Transition Culture...

Today sees the publication of what may well turn out to be one of the most important documents yet produced by a Transition initiative.  Over the next few weeks we will be returning to it, to hear a range of perspectives on it, and hope it will generate debate and discussion.  The document is the ‘Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint‘, and you can download it for free here.  The Blueprint is the first attempt that I am aware of to map in detail a local economy and to put a value on the potential benefits of an increased degree of localisation.  If you like, it identifies “the size of the prize” of Transition.

I talked with Sion this morning for 45 mins. We spoke via our computers using skype - which even allowed us to talk while seeing each other via small but functional web cameras. while sitting on opposite sides of the world.

Sion was wanting to ask about the community garden project he had visited while on Waiheke a few months ago. Sion was bringing his refined and accurate recording skills and would attend all the meetings of the various food groups on Waiheke, then produce amazing records of our conversation like this one from the Food Hui we had at Piritahi Marae which has since spawned a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Group.

It was hard for him to get his questions in until he told me his laptop battery was getting very low. As he sat in an echo-filled rock-walled library building in an Edinburgh University, I kept quizzing him about his circumstance there in Edinburgh, and asking for pictures of where he lived (the other day he’d mentioned cleaning up dog poo in the downstairs of his tenement building in an email)... » Read more

I spoke with Rob a while ago about the idea of collaborating on the next version. Well here is the whole book and an invitation to edit it - wiki style...

http://www.appropedia.org/The_Transition_Handbook_-_free_edit_version

Welcome to a rather exciting new venture for the Transition movement. Since the Transition Handbook was published in March 2008, it has been a very popular guide to the idea, now being published in a number of languages as the Transition movement spreads around the world. As these ideas are tried and tested in many cultures, contexts and different scales, the idea is to invite those who have actually been experimenting with it on the ground to rewrite the book. » Read more

When I first watched Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, my ears pricked up when he talked about actions we could do to personally combat climate change.  I was all fired up to do whatever it took to prevent the polar ice caps from melting, to save the polar bears, to turn back the rising tides.  He mentioned changing to energy efficient lightbulbs, and lobbying government. » Read more