Social Justice – Transition Cornwall +

What Can We Do?

December 19, 2018 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

At the University of Minnesota Dr. Nate Hagens teaches an honours course called “Reality 101: A Survey of the Human Predicament.” Hagens operated his own hedge fund on Wall Street until he glimpsed, “a serious disconnect between capitalism, growth, and the natural world. Money did not appear to bring wealthy clients more well being. ”Reality 101 addresses humanity’s toughest challenges: economic decline, inequality, pollution, biodiversity loss, and war. Students learn about systems ecology, neuroscience, and economics. “We ask hard questions,” says Hagens….

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Degrowth in the suburbs

November 7, 2018 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeNaMlibiak&w=560&h=315] So what would become of the suburbs if we gave up fossil fuels and moved toward a low-energy, post-carbon society beyond growth? Suburban catastrophists like James Kunstler in the US argue that fossil fuel depletion will imminently render the suburban landscape an inhospitable wasteland. Such curdled imaginations fail to recognise suburbia’s latent capacity to become something new. Inspired by research and advocacy from the likes of Ivan Illich, David Holmgren, and Ted Trainer, we see the suburbs as an ideal place to begin retrofitting our cities according…

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It’s time to talk about We

November 5, 2018 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

While change at a local level has created practical pieces of a regenerative culture; what an initiative that has emerged from the Stockholm Resilience Centre called seeds of a Good Anthropocene. [https://goodanthropocenes.net/], we have failed to significantly and measurably move the big picture. From my time working with Transition groups all around the world, I have seen these issues present in just about every Transition group. They lead me to ask whether we are working in the right way, or…

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World Food Day: 4 Easy Ways to Make a Difference

October 17, 2018 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

On World Food Day, observed every year on Oct. 16, we can all do our part to combat global hunger and malnutrition. The United Nations’ second Sustainable Development Goal calls for ending world hunger by 2030 and urges profound interventions from governments, businesses and individuals to help feed the growing number of hungry people in the world. Last year, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that chronic undernourishment grew to 821 million, or one in every nine people…

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Sustainable Activism: Managing Hope and Despair in Social Movements

December 19, 2016 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

Sustainable activism has what (Antonio) Gramsci called a ‘pessimism of the intellect’ which can avoid wishful thinking and face reality as squarely as possible. However it also retains an ‘optimism of the will’, an inner conviction that things can be different. By holding optimism and pessimism in tension, sustainable activism is better able to handle despair, and it has less need to resort to binary thinking as a way of engaging with reality. It can hold contradictions so that they…

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Can agroecology feed the world and save the planet?

October 10, 2016 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

The big question often asked is: can agroecological farming really feed the world, with the global population hurtling towards 9.6 billion by 2050? It’s clear that there’s increasing evidence it could. A landmark 2001 study by Jules Pretty and Rachel Hine examined 208 projects from 52 countries and found yield increases of 50-100% for rain-fed crops like maize. The cases studied involved 9 million farmers on around 3% of all of the farmed land in Asia, Africa and Latin America…

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Are Positive Stories Enough?

February 3, 2016 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

One question has cropped up repeatedly: In a world filled with melting ice caps, war, species extinctions, and economic peril, how can I possibly argue that the small-scale actions I write about can transform the bigger picture for the better? Belief in the possibility of change is a huge if intangible positive. So, too, is the proliferation of new social and economic models – from commoning, transition, and sharing, to local money, off-grid energy, and maker spaces. These are the infrastructure of…

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Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience

November 18, 2015 TCWordpress Comments 0 comment

Many people think of a community’s resilience as its ability to “bounce back” from disruption, and efforts to build resilience often focus on the impacts of climate change. Climate change is indeed an urgent and existential threat, with untold potential to destroy and disrupt countless lives. But it is not the only crisis we face, nor is preparing for disruption the only way to build resilience. Truly robust community resilience should do more. It should engage and benefit all community members,…

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