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It was a huge honour recently to be asked to be a speaker at the Jersey’s Climate Conversation, the island’s Citizens’ Assembly. I was asked to be their final presenter before they went off to deliberate their decisions. I was asked to give them a boost and a sense of why their deliberations matter so much. Here is the presentation I gave them, firstly the video, and then the transcript. I hope you enjoy it.

“It is a huge honour to have been asked to be your final presenter. I imagine you have already seen so many presenters that I’m quite the last thing you want to see. I hope there might just be room for one more.. . The first thing I want to say is thank you. You have had quite a time of it. Bombarded with complex information, immersed in concepts and science that may well have led to you having sleepless nights.

My own experience, when I really ‘got’ climate change, was like what the great mystics back through history have called a ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. This is an area of knowledge that can bring with it a burden, of despair, hopelessness, grief. I have huge respect to you all for taking up this challenge, on behalf of your fellow citizens, and bringing your best selves to figuring this stuff out.

I’m not here to tell you whether your target ought to be 2030, 2040, 2050. That’s not for me to say. I have only visited Jersey once, gave a talk about the urgent imperative to move away from oil and gas dependency, and was then talked about in the letters page of the island’s newspaper for weeks as if I were the most idealistic and dangerous person to ever set foot on the island…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rob Hopkins reviews ‘Human Kind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman

June 26, 2020

Rob Hopkins reviews ‘Human Kind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman

So many times, in conversations with friends reflecting on things we see happening in the world, someone will say “well, basically we’re all shit aren’t we?” Or “human beings are basically vile aren’t they?” Or words to that effect. This belief in a selfish, destructive, greedy, violent core to our being is deeply pervasive and underpins so many of the systems that are proving so damaging to the world. Rutger Bregman’s new book, ‘Human Kind’, turns that toxic nonsense on its head and argues that, in essence, “most people, deep down, are decent”, and that the world would be a very different place if we were to recognise that. It may be one of the most important books you will ever read.

Bregman writes, “if we believe most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because, ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times – from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another – then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature”.

Bregman begins by revisiting all of the ‘scientific’ research and works of fiction that we have been continually told shows that we are, essentially, selfish and horrible, and looks at it with fresh eyes. ‘Lord of the Flies’? Most UK-based readers of this will have studied this book in school, a book that shows how, when left to their own devices, kids turn on each other and act out the worst impulses of adult society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

My IPCC take-away: Imagine. Take Action. Repeat.

November 9, 2018

My IPCC take-away: Imagine. Take Action. Repeat.

For those who care about the world and the people and creatures we share it with, the last 6 weeks has offered a barrage of dire news. The new IPCC report called for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. We learnt that since the time the Beatles broke up and I was born (I claim no scandalous link between those two events), human activity has caused a 60% decline in mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians.

We’ve seen the German government, whose ‘Energiewende’ we were all celebrating a few years ago, dragging away protesters trying to prevent the clearing of an ancient woodland in order to create an open cast coal mine. Oh, and Brazil just elected a fascist who has vowed to turn much of the Amazon, that vital global carbon store, into farmland, merging the departments of environment and agriculture so as to ensure maximum cheap beef burger output. My own personal WTF moment was the US Department of Justice arguing last week, in their attempt to overturn a court case brought by 21 young people, that “there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’”. Er, excuse me? Is anyone actually taking this stuff seriously? Grief and rage feel an entirely appropriate response. As Bill McKibben put it, “we’re running out of options and we’re running out of decades”.

Image: James McKay.

As I work on the book I’m writing about imagination, I find myself intrigued with a thought that doesn’t seem to want to leave my head, namely that the deeper we get into climate change, the harder we seem to be finding it to imagine a way out. It’s an idea that, for me anyway, gets under the skin.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

10 Stories of Transition in the US: Transition Fidalgo & Friends’ Vision 2030

October 17, 2018

10 Stories of Transition in the US: Transition Fidalgo & Friends’ Vision 2030

The following story is the ninth installment in a new series we’re calling “10 Stories of Transition in the US.” Throughout 2018, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Transition Movement here in the United States, we will explore 10 diverse and resilient Transition projects from all over the country, in the hope that they will inspire you to take similar actions in your local community.

For more information about Transition, please visit www.TransitionUS.org/Transition-101. Click here to view other stories in this series that have already been published, and here to subscribe to the Transition US newsletter if you’d like to be notified of additional stories as they become available.

Vision 2030 Cover

In 2005, a group of Permaculture students from Kinsale Further Education College set a course for how their town of 7,000 people on the west coast of Ireland could transition to a better quality of life while dramatically reducing fossil fuel consumption. Exploring 11 key sectors, including food, energy, tourism, education, and health, Kinsale 2021: An Energy Descent Action Plan laid out a clear vision for their community’s future and identified practical steps that would need to be taken each year to achieve it. Initiated, overseen, and edited by their professor, Rob Hopkins, this plan was soon adopted by the Town Council of Kinsale, and when it was posted online, it quickly spread around the world as people everywhere embraced it as a groundbreaking tool for cultivating community-level sustainability and resilience.

In the three years that followed, Hopkins co-founded the first official Transition Initiative in the world, Transition Town Totnes, published The Transition Handbook, and helped to launch the international Transition Towns Movement.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lise van Susteren on Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the imagination

April 24, 2018

Lise van Susteren on Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the imagination

A while ago I was reading a report about the psychological impacts of climate change, and came across the term ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’. It fascinated me. The author of the piece that discussed the idea was Lise van Susteren. Lise is a General and Forensic Psychiatrist in Washington D.C , and has been involved in climate change issues for the last 12 years or so. In 2005 she sought political office, seeking the Democratic nomination to the US Senate in Maryland.

She describes ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ as “a before-the-fact version of classic PTSD”. I was intrigued as to what impact living in a state of ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ might have on the human imagination, on its ability to flourish, and to imagine the future in positive ways. Are we all, to one degree or another, living in a state of ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’? When we spoke, I started by asking Lise what the term means to her?

“You know, here’s the thing. I called it Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder because it is the off-spring of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but in fact when I look at it now, and the terminology that I used, ‘disorder’, gosh, I’m here thinking to myself, “It’s not Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s a Pre-Traumatic Stress condition that I wonder why everybody else doesn’t have?”

Maybe the disorder is not having a Pre-Traumatic Stress condition. Given everything the scientists are telling us, given how late the hour is, and how grave the consequences, the abnormality now is not having a Pre-Traumatic Stress condition.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Douglas Rushkoff: “we’ve disabled the cognitive and collaborative skills needed to address climate change”

March 14, 2018

Douglas Rushkoff: “we’ve disabled the cognitive and collaborative skills needed to address climate change”

How does our relationship with digital technologies alter our relationship with the future, with the present, and with our imaginations? It’s a question we’ve reflected on in various podcasts and interviews in this series. One of the books that most influenced me on this was Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Present Shock’. Rushkoff is a writer, documentarian and lecturer, whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age.

He’s a prolific guy. Fifteen books including the brilliantly-titled ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus’, documentaries such as ‘Generation Like’ and ‘Merchants of Cool’, a podcast called ‘Team Human’, and several graphic novels. He has also worked as a stage fight choreographer, and played keyboards for industrial noise art terror combo Psychic TV. He is a winner of the beautifully named ‘Neil Postman Award for Career Achivement in Public Intellectual Activity’, and is currently Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens in New York. It was a real honour to be able to speak to him recently via Skype. I started by asking what he meant in ‘Present Shock’ when we wrote “our society has re-oriented itself to the present moment”.

“Present Shock was really looking at the way that I guess digital media in particular has changed the temporal landscape. It’s changed the way we contend with time. The Ancient Greeks had two understandings of time really. Two words for time. One was ‘chronos’, which is time on the clock. You know, “what time did you crash the car?” “I crashed the car at 4.17”.

The other idea called ‘kairos’, which is more like time as a readiness. “What time are you going to tell your father you crashed the car?” It doesn’t matter what the time on the clock is, you’re going to tell him when he’s feeling good, after he’s had his drink but before he’s opened his bills. So that’s a kind of time that’s not a chronological time so much as a readiness time, an intuitive time.

What I believe is that digital technology has emphasised this more chronological time and disconnected us from some of the more intuitive or natural bottom up understandings of time. Anything that’s not really a metric, anything that’s not measurable, goes away in the digital simulations or representations of the world we live in.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sarah Woods on imagination and “the crisis of what comes next”.

March 7, 2018

Sarah Woods on imagination and “the crisis of what comes next”.

If it is true that we are living through a time in which our collective imagination is increasingly devalued and undernourished, what might be the role of story in that, and how might story be part of the remedy? There are few better people to discuss this with than Sarah Woods. Sarah is a writer across all media and her work has been produced by many companies including the RSC, Hampstead and the BBC.

Her opera ‘Wake’, composed by Giorgio Battistelli, opens in March, as does her play ‘Primary’, about the UK state education system. Alongside many other projects, she is currently writing the musical of the play she co-wrote with the late Heathcote Williams ‘The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency’, about squatting and DIY culture. Her play ‘Borderland’ just won the Tinniswood Award for best radio drama script of 2017.

Sarah is a Wales Green Hero, and her work is about, as she told me, “story wherever it’s most useful, across the board”. I started by asking her the question I always ask in these interviews, but never as the first question. If you had been elected as the Prime Minister at the next election and you had run on a programme of ‘Make Britain Imaginative Again’, what might be some of the things that you would announce in your first 100 days?

“I would want for everybody to start looking at society and their lives as systems, which is about three things isn’t it? Elements and interconnections and then the things that come out of that. I suppose at the moment I feel that we’ve got a problem with the way that we’re relating to each other. There’s a lot of division so that we’re in little boxes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Ticking a box is no longer an option’: David van Reybrouck on elections, imagination and Brexit.

November 3, 2017

‘Ticking a box is no longer an option’: David van Reybrouck on elections, imagination and Brexit.

David van Reybrouck lives in Brussels, is a pre-historic archaeologist, but works mostly as a literary writer, and as a non-fiction writer. He’s probably best known for his book ‘Congo: the epic history of a people’, for appearing in the film ‘Tomorrow’ (‘Demain’), and for his more recent book ‘Against Elections: the case for democracy’, which is a brilliant read. We met up via Skype, and talked imagination, Brexit, and reimagining how we make decisions together.

I wonder if you had any thoughts on in what ways the current way that we practice democracy in the West diminishes our imagination, maybe particularly in relation to our ability to imagine something other than business as usual?

You could say that the procedures we use today to do democracy have drastically narrowed down the scope of what is politically imaginable. To me, although I’m interested in politics, it’s become quite a bit of a boring game, really. It’s all about winning elections, trying to build a coalition, trying to run a government, or be against the government that is in power. The bickering that is going on is not very rich. The strategies that are being used for political gain and political loss are less interesting than watching the Tour De France on a boring day.

Political journalism very often has come down to a form of sports journalism, really. Like, who has made what manoeuvre and what will it bring to him or to her. The political game as it is being played these days is a pretty boring one, and a pretty predictable one, yes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Permaculture, Climate & Survival

October 23, 2015

Permaculture, Climate & Survival

SUMMARY: From 15th Annual International Permaculture Convergence in London, September 9th, 2015: “Cool Talk” by Albert Bates from The Farm in Tennessee. Albert interviews Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins. Australian permaculturalist Rosemary Morrow tells us Western permies are the minority, compared to East Asia, India, Africa, and the Pacific Islands.

WELCOME

If you don’t know what permaculture is when we start, you will by the end of this intensive radio feature.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen right now on Soundcloud!

ALBERT BATES

Albert Bates is the author of books like “The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change” and “The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times”. He is the host of “The Great Change” blog at peaksurfer.blogspot.ca.

But that just touches the surface. Formerly an environmental lawyer, Bates is one of the long-time residents of the Tennessee intentional community “The Farm“. That’s where so many great alternative ideas and low-tech solutions are created. We last had Albert on Radio Ecoshock for an interview on January 29th, 2014. Find the blog for that show here. Or you can download or listen to that previous interview here.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Book Review: ‘Everything Gardens’ by Luigi Russi.

August 29, 2015

Book Review: ‘Everything Gardens’ by Luigi Russi.

Academic work on Transition can often be infuriating rather than illuminating. I was once asked to peer review a paper on Transition, a movement I was central in kickstarting and shaping, but I had to decline on the grounds that the paper was utterly incomprehensible. While some research is excellent, and offers useful insights and meaningful data, there is also much that leaves me cold, or bewildered. With this in mind, I picked up a copy of Luigi Russi’s ‘Everything Gardens and other stories: growing Transition Culture‘ with a certain trepidation.

Russi is a sociologist based at the University of Exeter, who set out to research Transition Town Totnes, not through a literature review or a few interviews, but by moving to the town, rolling his sleeves up, and getting involved. In spite of my initial reticence, I actually loved ‘Everything Gardens’, and had a few ‘aha” moments as I went through. Russi begins by questioning the usual approach that academic work on Transition tends to take, that of defining what it is (i.e. a response to peak oil and climate change etc), then to the model it proposes (still usually stuck on the 2008 model of ‘The 12 Steps’), which leads to an assessment of how well Transition is achieving its goals, how it is ‘performing’? It’s an approach that treats Transition as though it were some sort of set of policies that can be evaluated. As a result of this approach, much of the ensuing research bears little resemblance to what many Transitioners will be experiencing through their active participation in Transition.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer

June 2, 2015

Richard Heinberg wants you to “learn to be successfully and happily poorer.” Photo: video screenshot.

Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer

While Marx predicted that socialism would follow capitalism, Richard Heinberg predicts the next thing will be localism.

“All roads appear to lead eventually to localism; the questions are: how and when shall we arrive there, and in what condition? (And, how local?),” Heinberg writes in his latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.

But that’s not what’s new in this collection of Heinberg’s essays. Anyone following the Transition movement has been hearing for nearly a decade that more active local economies are the inevitable future once the triple threat of climate change, peak oil and economic crisis topples global industrial capitalism as we know it. The message came through loud and clear in 2008 with The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins and the world’s local future has been a core tenet of Transition ever since.

What’s new about Afterburn is that it offers two things that Transitioners or anyone else who forecasts a more local future needs today: inspiration and advice for the future that’s better than most of what you’ll read elsewhere.

Inspiration

These days, with gas prices hovering around $2.50 a gallon and all the talk about cheap gas from fracking, if you still care about peak oil, then you’re going to be pretty lonely. It’s easy to feel like you’re the crazy person for seeing an end to fossil fuels and thinking it’s a big deal when everybody else acts like the party of cheap energy and economic growth is going to last forever.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/inspiration-for-the-burned-out-localizer/#sthash.LLWef4Ru.dpu

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