Rob Hopkins

Transition’s life as a straw man

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I am currently reading Carl Sagan’s excellent book “The Demon-haunted World: science as a candle in the dark”, which I picked up for a song in a second hand bookshop when I was last in London. Here he sets out what not to do when trying to assess the validity of an argument, and common ways that people make flawed arguments. One of those is creating a straw man, which he defines as “caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack”. Having spent Monday morning debating on ABC Radio in Australia with someone who has done just this, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on being a straw man.

How defining planetary boundaries can transform our approach to growth

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Our planet’s ability to provide an accommodating environment for humanity is being challenged by our own activities. The environment—our life-support system—is changing rapidly from the stable Holocene state of the last 12,000 years, during which we developed agriculture, villages, cities, and contemporary civilizations, to an unknown future state of significantly different conditions. One way to address this challenge is to determine “safe boundaries” based on fundamental characteristics of our planet and to operate within them.

Addressing public concerns about wind power

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CSE’s view is that wind power is a necessary part of the energy mix that is required to meet our carbon emission reduction targets and help tackle climate change. However, wind power is not appropriate everywhere, and we believe it is the duty of local communities themselves to decide where there is a place for it through engaging responsibly with the best available evidence, and through working together to assess their own locality.

A fashion for austerity

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The recent flurry of media stories about last weekend’s failed prophecy of the Rapture — think of it as a dry run for 2012 — raises several points relevant to the peak oil movement as the end of the age of cheap energy starts to catch the attention of the mainstream. The most intriguing is the possibility — dismissed by a great many peak oil writers just now, but by no means impossible — that the movement toward radically less energy use that’s so desperately needed in the industrial world right now might actually become a popular fad. Could that actually happen, and if it did, what might the implications be?

Ambitious plan launches to establish bee corridors across the U.K.

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Like the United States, the United Kingdom has seen honeybee populations plummet in the last couple of years. The Co-operative Group—a U.K.-based consumer cooperative—has launched an awareness campaign around the issue, and a comprehensive plan of action. The US$1.2 million campaign, called Plan Bee, includes the establishment of long rows of bee-friendly habitats across the country to act as bee corridors. The corridors will also support other key pollinator species like bumble bees, hover flies, butterflies, and moths.

The China bubble: An export-led development model

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The fundamental economic model that China has depended on for the past couple of decades was borrowed from Japan, and consists of producing low-cost export goods to fund investment at home. Essentially the same model is being pursued by Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The story of what happened to Japan as a result of following this strategy should be a cautionary tale for its neighbors, and for Beijing in particular.

Mountebank wins Nobel for infinite planet theory

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Few people have read the dense volumes published by the economist Milton Mountebank, but his work has affected you, me and every single person on the planet. Dr. Mountebank has revolutionized economic thought, and now he has been recognized for his singular efforts. Yesterday at a gala reception in Stockholm, Sweden, the chairman of Sveriges Riksbank, Peter Norborg, presented Dr. Mountebank with the Nobel Prize in Economics for his lifetime of work on infinite planet theory.

Farming fiber

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“We’re not trying to mimic industrial production, but we are trying to find that scale halfway between hand-spinning your yarn and a football field-sized industrial spinning rack,” says Burgess. Not, in many ways, unlike artisan food production. “I’d love to see the food movement incorporate the fiber movement, because, whether it’s what we put in our body or what we put on our bodies, all of it comes from the same soil.”

Work and ecology: Less is more

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Work, for an individual or a society, begins with the effort required to modify or eradicate the ecology that’s there and replace it with something else. For most of history, this is in fact exactly what was meant by the word work. Even more specifically: in most places it meant cutting down forests and then hoeing, plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting fields. In another word, farming. That was the first work and it is still the one that is prior to all others.