Transition Brighton and Hove

When - Wed 7. May 7:30pm - 9:30pm. Where - The Werks . Organised by - Transition Brighton and Hove.
Description - A meeting to share ideas on how best to move on from where we are, to look at what we have done so far and what we need to do more of – what's gone well and what we need to change, and the challenges and opportunities ahead.  This will be an energising and engaging meeting in which the co-ord ... read more.

Before writing an article for brightonactivist.net, I felt compelled to look for the definition of ‘activism’ in Wikipedia, because I wasn’t entirely sure if Transition Brighton and Hove fell into this category. I tend to think of activism as things such as marches, publicity stunts, and lobbying the government. The Transition movement might get involved in things of this nature, but they’re certainly not our main focus, and even less the reason we are pulling our efforts together.

But in the third paragraph of Wikipedia I find a reassuring sentence: “In some cases, activism has nothing to do with protest or confrontation: for instance, some religious, feminist or vegetarian/vegan activists try to persuade people to change their behavior directly, rather than persuade governments to change laws.” That’s good news; we are definitely activists of this type.

So, what is it that we would like to change? Ideally, we would change the composition of the atmosphere so that climate change wouldn’t happen, and discover a new plentiful renewable energy source that was also practically free so that we don’t need to worry about the depletion of oil, gas, or any type of fossil fuel. Considering that neither of these things seems very likely in the foreseeable future, we will settle for second or third best.