Rob Hopkins founder of the Transition movement has a long interview with Neil Adger on resilience, peak oil, and climate adaptation on Transition Culture. Neil Adger is a professor in Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and a member of the Resilience Alliance (Neil briefly explains social resilience in a video here). RH: […]
Rob Hopkins, Founder of the Transition movement, published ‘The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience’ in 2008. Here is an extract from the book under the headline ‘What are resilience indicators’, Carbon footprinting and the cutting of carbon emissions are clearly a crucial part of preparing for an energy-lean future, but they are […]
1) Jeremy Cherfas writes on the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog about the history of the green revolution: The standard litany against the Green Revolution is that it failed to banish hunger because the technologies it ushered in were no use to small peasant farmers. Farmers with access to cash and good land did well, but poorer […]
The concept of resilience appears to be really spreading. One interesting group of people attempting to build resilience in specific communities is the Transition town movement. A global network of communities each of which is attempting to build their resilience to climate change and peak oil while addressing the question: “for all those aspects of […]
The transition network, which we have repeatedly covered on Resilience Science, had its fourth meeting recently in Devon, UK. About 300 people from the over 300 official Transition initiatives attended the meeting in Devon. Where they discussed peak oil, climate change, and financial crisis; but more importantly what they could do about. Design guru and […]
The Resilience Alliance website has pointed to an interesting working paper from Alex Haxeltine, and Gill Seyfang from the Tyndall Centre in the UK Transitions for the People: Theory and Practice of ‘Transition’ and ‘Resilience’ in the UK’s Transition Movement, whose focus on developing transition towns to respond to the challenges of climate change and […]
Rich people moving to attractive rural areas are transforming the economy of those areas from resource extraction to an experience economy (see also Inequality and an ecosystem service transition). A Wall Street Journal article The New American Gentry (Jan 19th) describes this trend, and includes a large map that highlights areas that have experienced large […]
Guest post by Simon West: Reflections on Week Two of the Resilience Research School PhD course, ‘Why Bother with Durkheim? Using (classical) social science to understand the social dynamics of social-ecological systems. (previously Week One – why study classics). There is almost certainly no social scientist whose reputation precedes them as much as Karl Marx. […]
‘Town’ series on BBC2 examines the role of towns in the UK. The last show in the series looks at the resilience of Totnes, the founding site of rapidly growing Transition Towns movement, which is represented locally by Transition Town Totnes. The show focuses on the town, rather than the transition movement, but its focus […]
Disasters have complex effects on communities. Love in a Little Town is short film about community resilience made by James Muir. He writes: “Lyttelton is the port for Christchurch City, New Zealand, that was devastated by an earthquake in February this year. In this time of great loss, Lyttelton and its community stood out as […]