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Transition Network Inaugural Conference, Ruskin Mill, Nailsworth.
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
Representatives from 35 communities up and down the UK crammed into the beautiful surroundings of Ruskin Mill, in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, on Thursday 31st May for the Inaugural Conference of the Transition Network. The event was both an opportunity to network the many Transition Initiatives springing up around the UK and also an opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary momentum that the concept is generating. Despite the occasionally cramped nature of the space due to its being filled to its capacity (many more people were unable to come due to lack of spaces), it was an amazing day, full of energy, hope and possibility.
…Transition Network founder Rob Hopkins [observed that] although widely adopted, the term Transition Towns has become largely irrelevant, as within the room were representatives of Transition Village, Cities, Towns, Boroughs, Postcodes, Valleys, Peninsulas, Regions and Hamlets! The initiatives gathered were all at different stages, some at quite an advanced stage, and others having just done their first End of Suburbia screening. He spoke of the role of the Network as being to support, inspire, train and network all these initiatives, and how the aim of the day was to hear how that can best be done.
Everyone getting involved in the Transition model is essentially, he said, part of an enormous research project, testing out the simple idea that the future with less oil could be preferable to the future, each in their own way in their own communities. He closed by quoting a lady who attended an Open Space day in Totnes, “whenever I think about what TTT is doing, I feel so full of hope I could cry”.
… Part of the Transition concept is to make events feel historic, and this one certainly had that feel to it. It felt like the beginning of something extraordinary. The sense that this process unlocks something unstoppable was a common one.
(1 June 2007)
Much more at the conference at Philip Booth’s website Ruscombe Green.
(28 May 2007)
What you can do about Peak Oil (7-page PDF)
James Ward, ASPO-Australia
James Ward, Convenor of the ASPO-Australia Young Professionals Working Group, has prepared a document outlining practical steps that individuals can take to respond to the threat of Peak Oil.
Sections include:
Transportation
Shopping
Growing Your Own Food
Advocacy
(4 June 2007)
Ward is also a PhD Candidate in Hydrogeology.
An upbeat presentation that doesn’t get bogged down in theoretical discussions. Other Energy Bulletin articles by James Ward:
Young professionals and peak oil
Al Bartlett’s resources depletion protocol for a sustainable Australia
Notes from the Australian Institute of Energy annual forum
-BA
Principle 20: Citizen Media
WorldChanging Team
Who the storyteller is has a lot to do with the kind of story you’re likely to hear. That’s why citizen media is important: we need to learn to think in new ways about a wide array of interconnected and emerging problems, and to do that well, we need a wide array of perspectives on those problems, and channels for the introduction of possible solutions. In the public debate, no less than in ecosystem science, diversity promotes resilience.
Luckily, we find ourselves with more tools for citizen storytelling than ever before, and more citizen journalists are rushing to use them. From zines to blogs, pirate radio to podcasts, independent filmmaking to video journals, immersive fiction to sms text message campaigns to machinima, the tools and methods are proliferating.
Three trends seem especially worth noting.
First, as these tools get cheaper, they enable people who never before had a global voice to find one
(3 June 2007)
The Future of Philanthropy: Innovation, Networks, Thought Leaders and the Fringe
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
…Good philanthropy, it seems to me, funds innovation that would otherwise never emerge, and supports action where none would otherwise be taken.
Not all good works require philanthropic support. Some are the proper role of governments. Some can be provided through businesses, or social-benefit organizations run like businesses. Some can be produced through commons-based peer production. The majority require no organization or planning at all: they are simply the things good people do for other people in the course of daily life — watching their kids, sharing food with them, listening to them when they are in distress, sharing an idea or a story with them. The vast majority of the work that keeps our societies together is not underwritten by philanthropists.
That said, there are certain key tasks which are extremely unlikely to turn a profit (so business won’t support them), not amenable to peer-production, beyond the capacity of average people to do casually in daily life and are too risky or controversial for governments to effectively support. What’s more, we know that as our need for innovation and innovation diffusion increases, these tasks grow more crucial. Indeed, much of the thinking, creativity and communication most needed to solve big planetary problems can only be funded through philanthropic effort, for it requires a combination of public-mindedness, vision and risk-taking found only in the work of great philanthropists (of whatever means).
But all is not well in the world of giving.
Philanthropic organizations have never had more money, sure, but there is a growing (if rarely spoken) consensus among the smart set in philanthropy that these organizations, and many major donors, don’t really know how to react to either the new kinds of needs they’re seeing, or the new opportunities with which they’re presented.
I certainly don’t have the answers, but here are the questions, as I see them:
1) Hunting the Fringes
How do you find and encourage innovation?
It is nearly a truism that innovation comes from the fringe of any field, out where strikingly new thinking is taking place — as Thomas Kuhn put it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, ideas must be “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes” of thought, and those kinds of ideas don’t emerge by tweaking slightly the established conventional wisdom.
…2) Feeding the Network
We live in an era where change is powered by networks, of course, but we don’t yet live in an era where networks are funded by philanthropists.
There’s a tendency on the part of funders to view networks as a sort of free good, something that just happens on its own and needs no help. That’s too bad, because the best small networks I know are not financial epiphytes, growing without resources, but rather groups of people who do a lot with very few resources, or with means borrowed or stolen or subverted from other purposes. Almost all of them would benefit from more resources, more staff time, more ability to invest and pursue. It’s not that they don’t have roots, those roots are just hard to see, and they could always use a little more mulch.
That isn’t to say that we really know how to fund networked action most effectively.
…3) Acknowledging The Elephant of Age
Youth in the environmental movement — or rather the lack of it — brings up another set of questions. Why have traditional activist NGO groups been aging so rapidly? In some cases, I’ve been told, the memberships of environmental NGOs are aging almost one year per year… a figure worth thinking about. Why are fewer and fewer younger people formally joining groups, giving official donations and participating in the rituals of civic life? Why do activist NGOs seem so lame to them?
Could it be because they are? We’ve written plenty before about the limitations of the current model of professional activism — the tendency to reduce participation to writing checks and one-click actions,
(4 June 2007)
