[Scpg] Rob Hopkins' talk at the TED conference in Oxford UK

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

_http://blog.ted.com/2009/07/rob_hopkins_at.php_ 
(http://blog.ted.com/2009/07/rob_hopkins_at.php) 
 
Duncan Davidson  
_Rob  Hopkins_ (http://transitionculture.org/about/)  is one of the leaders 
of a new movement of people living as  fossil fuel-free as possible called 
the _Transition  Movement_ (http://transitionculture.org/about/) . He 
explains that he teaches people how to grow their own  food and build their own 
homes. Before he began his current work, he worked with  the current global 
economic growth model, but then he says, he came into contact  with something 
that changed him. At this point, he unveils a liter of oil. He  tells us 
that this bottle of oil contains the energy equivalent of five weeks of  human 
labor by 35 strong people.  
Hopkins says that our degree of oil dependency is our degree of  
vulnerability. We will not have oil forever. For every five barrels we consume,  we 
only gather one. There are 98 oil producing nations but 65 have already  
passed their peak. "Is our brilliance and creativity going to evaporate?" he  
asks. The answer he gives is no, but he says that our options have to be  
realistic and mentions that climate change scientist have an increasingly  
terrified look in their eyes.  
He asserts that our society seems to have the idea that technology will 
solve  everything, pointing out that this idea is always popular at TED. But, 
Hopkins  says, we can’t create new lands and energy systems at the click of a 
mouse.  There are still people mining coal, as we speak. We live in a world 
of real  constraints and demands. Energy and technology are not the same 
thing.  
Hopkins outlines the qualities of the transition response: iviral,  
open-source, self-organizing, solutions-focused, sensitive to place and scale,  
learns from its mistakes and is a joyful process. It’s not about winning the  
argument, he says, it’s about changing the climate. Transition depends on the 
 idea of resilience, which he thinks is a more useful concept than  
sustainability. Sustainability wants the supermarket to be more energy  efficient, 
while resilience questions the vulnerability of depending on the  
supermarket.  
Then, Hopkins walks us through how one of the transition projects are  
realized. It begins when you have a group excited by the idea. That group then  
runs an awareness-raising program, looking at how this might work in their 
town.  They form more groups from which projects start and then continue to 
spread.  There are over 2,000 transition projects around the world at the 
moment and  thousands more in the mulling stage. There are community 
agriculture schemes,  community energy schemes, groups promoting recycling, 
garden-shares and even  alternative currencies. There are also groups designing energy 
descent plans, in  case there is not more growth in the world, but less.  
Hopkins noted that the Transition handbook he has written was the fifth 
most  popular book that Brits took on holiday. The Leicestshire and Somerset  
transition communities have become involved in local government. He says 
they're  not changing things, things are inevitably changing and we just have to 
work  creatively with that.  
We’ve been astonishingly lucky, Hopkins tells us, but he also asks us to  
honor what it has bought us. By loving and leaving all the oil age has done 
for  us, he thinks we can begin a world of more resilience where we are 
fitter, more  skilled and more connected to each other. 
**************Hot Deals at Dell on Popular Laptops perfect for Back to 
School 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1223105306x1201716871/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Faltfarm.mediaplex.com%2Fad%2Fck%2F12309%2D81939%2D1629%2D9)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/southern-california-permaculture/attachments/20090730/dce96471/attachment.html>