Peak Oil and Local Resilience: Rob Hopkins Addresses the IFG
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 09.16.07
It’s been a little while since we’ve heard from Rob Hopkins of the Transition Towns movement, so we checked in on his Transition Culture blog to see what has been going on. It turns out Rob was recently asked to address the International Forum on Globalization taking place in Washington DC this weekend on the subject of peak oil and community resilience. With Rob being in the UK, had he travelled to the conference this trip would have involved a significant amount of carbon emissions and squandered fuel, something that the Transition Town folks do not take lightly. Fortunately the wonders of modern technology allowed for Rob to give his presentation from the comforts of home. We are, of course, delighted that this approach also has the added bonus that we can now bring you his talk, wherever you happen to be in the world (part one is posted above, with parts two and three appearing below the fold). As Rob says, perhaps more conferences should start experimenting with virtual presentations:
“I think we ought to do a lot more sending DVDs of talks to conferences and staying at home. Perhaps we should see conferences as being more like the Oscars, a talk, a filmed greeting, some music, another film and another talk. Keep the media changing. Anyway, this is my attempt.”
Bravo to Rob for sticking with his principles and still managing to spread knowledge of his important work around the world.
Part Two
Part Three
::Transition Culture:: via site visit::
Wonderful presentation. Very intelligent. I also appreciate his effort to inspire others to do conference presentations by videoconference or through prerecorded videocasts. However, often times conference set ups are a business where the conference organizers make money by charging presentators money for making a presentation or charge attendees money to have the ability to see a presenter in person. I hope this type of business model changes.