December 2009 archive

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.

From his bio at Ted.com:

Hopkins leads a vibrant new movement of towns and cities that utilize local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their ecological footprints. In the face of climate change he developed the concept of Transition Initiatives — communities that produce their own goods and services, curb the need for transportation and take other measures to prepare for a post-oil future. While Transition shares certain principles with greenness and sustainability, it is a deeper vision concerned with re-imagining our future in a self-sufficient way and building resiliency.

Transforming theory to action, Hopkins is also the co-founder and a resident of the first Transition Initiative in the UK, in Totnes, Devon. As he refuses to fly, it is from his home in Totnes that he offers help to hundreds of similar communities that have sprung up around the world, in part through his blog, transitionculture.org

Hopkins, who’s trained in ecological design, wrote the principal work on the subject, Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, a 12-step manual for a postcarbon future.

Hopkins website is “Transition Culture: An evolving exploration into the head, heart and hands of energy descent“, where he asks “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” One of the posts I found most thought provoking on his site is Your Free Guide to Setting Up Local Currencies, available in .pdf for download on that page. He discusses in the video below some communities setting up their own currencies and local economies.

Here is Hopkins giving a talk for Ted.com, filmed this past July and posted there in November this year…

originally posted by Will Urquhart at Sum of Change

Last weekend, I attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York, put together by Charles Lenchner of the Working Families Party. This conference brought people together to hear from some of the greatest minds in the online organizing world. I came out of it with lots of great footage, and today we are previewing some of it. The majority of the footage, however, will be featured in our Training Tuesday series. So check back Tuesday at 6:00pm for more Organizing 2.0 footage. We are also collecting all our Organizing 2.0 footage onto one page here. But if you are reading this, then you really should find the time to watch these videos.

1971, I was still in high school.  I’d had some rocky teen years with divorce and alcoholism invading my family.  I grew my hair long and proclaimed myself an anti-establishment hippie.  I was young of course, my ideology was far from consistent, not that it ever has been.  Life is about learning, then we die I guess.  But I took things to heart more than most.  I believed in it.  I dug up an old song recently and it made me realize my current attitude is really no different.  I’ve done grown up and I’m still in 1971.  

“Everywhere is freaks and hairies

Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity

Tax the rich, feed the poor

Till there are no rich no more?

I’d love to change the world

But I don’t know what to do

So I’ll leave it up to you

Population keeps on breeding

Nation bleeding, still more feeding economy

Life is funny, skies are sunny

Bees make honey, who needs money, Monopoly

I’d love to change the world

But I don’t know what to do

So I’ll leave it up to you

World pollution, there’s no solution

Institution, electrocution

Just black and white, rich or poor

Them and us, stop the war

I’d love to change the world

But I don’t know what to do

So I’ll leave it up to you”

Peace!

(I will be cross-posting at OpenLeft and thomhartmann.com)

I.e., a set of national demonstrations by which people will demonstrate not on any one or two particular issues which serves as a theme, but rather on any issue for which they believe that neither the Democrats nor Republicans represent them. Another way to think of this is: the protests are jointly directed at the Democratic and Republican parties, themselves. I’ve never heard of such a thing, so the novelty, alone, might make it significant.

I’ve already thought up my sign’s slogan: “Down with the Dumbos, and down with the Jackasses! (If I want clowns running things, I can go to a circus.)”

Besides the Demonstration-As-Free-Speech-Expression aspect, and the (probably vain) hope that Congressional D’s and R’s will change course, such a demonstration COULD HELP FOSTER COOPERATION BETWEEN GROUPS THAT, THOUGH HAVING UNBRIDGEABLE GAPS IN SOME OF THEIR POSITIONS, WOULD DO WELL TO COLLABORATE IN THROWING OUT CORPORATIST SCOUNDRELS, OF BOTH PARTIES.

Voting bloc technology is going to make this more practical than it is, right now, but getting rid of UNECESSARY polarization could help us get a jump start on bottom-up, collaborative processes.

Another benefit is that it’ll help Independents to realize their collective power.

Yet another benefit: I’ll bet you could make an entertaining book and movie out of the demonstrations. Hopefully including a friendly competition of skits wherein the hypocrisy and apparent incompetence of members of the government (especially Presidents) is the subject – but the audience will not be told, ahead of time, the ideological orientation of the actors (if any). Think of political skits on “Saturday Night Live”, but with more of a bite, and with an implicit motive of actually doing something about the situation. The idea here is educational as much as entertaining – instead of wallowing in the “aren’t they stupid?” mudhole, Democrats can see that Republican voters aren’t happy with Republican politicos, and vice versa, and often for some of the same reasons. Such a video and book might prove seminal as the public moves to an e-democracy.

Sometime last year, I caught a 20/20 TV program (or Dateline, or somesuch other news magazine) regarding Amanda Knox. I remember being bothered by the reporter’s tone regarding Ms. Knox (which was, at best, Nancy Grace-ish sensationalist), and I remember being bothered that nothing in this twisted story seemed to add up or make any sense.

The program was two hours long and I was way, WAY confused when it ended.

For those of you not paying attention, Amanda Knox is a 22-year-old American woman who was convicted  of murder last week, in an Italian court, for the death of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.

I’ve been minimally obsessed with this thing, and I’ve now read a metric fuckton regarding the entire situation. It doesn’t take a friggin’ rocket scientist to figure out Ms. Knox was not convicted in an Italian courtroom. They had extremely sketchy physical evidence, Holmes.

Like many other high-profile cases of this nature, Ms. Knox was convicted in the fucking press. And she was convicted because she’s a “whore”.