Last month I was at the Schumacher College in Totnes, UK for a three week course entitled After Copenhagen: Opportunities and Challenges. If I’ve learned anything from the experience it’s that the process is more important then the outcome. Therefore I have created this blog/vlog as a journey in the making of a documentary entitled Small Is Beautiful.
In my final days at the Schumacher College I decided to take a break from the heavy lectures series; I needed to digest. The course was an excellent example in community, teamwork, and open space discussion and it felt less like a college and more like a 700-year-old home. I entered my library, “What a collection I have.” Drawn, as usual to the S I easily located my large collection of E.F. Schumacher’s work and sat down with an edition of Small is Beautiful that I had never seen before.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Small Is Beautiful, it is one of the earlier thorough examination of Western societies domination of nature and the “general aimlessness” of our technologies. Every line of the book is just as prevalent today as it was when it was written in 1975. Chapter titles include: The Problem of Production, The Proper Use of Land, Social and Economic Problems Calling for the Development of Intermediate Technology. For quite some time now I have been searching for the right way to bring these words off the page and onto the screen. However, I knew that there was no way I could accomplish this using the modern eco documentary trend of having a bunch of environmentalist telling you how to live your life. I needed to find real life subjects.
Humanities’ fantastic technical progress over the last 200 years is directly linked to our exploitation of fossil fuels. As our gluttonous ways infect global trends so to do our greenhouse gas emission, which are at fault for climate change.
Paradoxically as we introduce technologies into communities in order to raise “standards of living” these very people who are supposed to be benefiting from this raise in “standard of living” instantly become dependant on global trade infrastructures, which if history repeats itself, we will keep booming and busting and our economies will inevitably dissolve with along with the earth’s energy.
This collapse scenario is not something I wish to speak about in depth, as the focus of this film is positive visioning.
Back at the Schumacher College I reflected on the lectures given by Rob Hopkins author of the Transition Town Handbook. I was naturally inspired by the work done by Transition Town Totnes and their continuing efforts to understand what a sustainable community will look like. Sustainability is a loosely used term often thrown around by the business as usual crowd, therefore I think it is important to mention that the Transition Town Initiatives do a lot of work in visioning. It is also important to note that most Transition Town Initiatives speak more commonly in terms of their work as building on the resilience of a community. Some of this work includes the development of a local currency, cross-generational education of the twin hydrocarbons (peak oil, climate change), and publishing an Energy Decent plan (2010).
For this documentary I need to find other western Communities on the cusp of change and find out what a sustainable community looks like.
Check out TTT @ http://transitionculture.org/
Find a Transition Initiative near you @ www.transitionnetwork.org/
CHECK OUT Village Vancouver our very own Transition Initiative villagevancouver.ning.com/
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
