The New Optimists Blog
What’s going on in your GP’s brain?
The wiggly red lines on the big screen (left) are the workings of a highly trained, very experienced medical man. Jim Parle, Professor of Primary Care at Birmingham Medical School.
His head is in the MEG scanner at Aston University, and there’s a video stream of the experiment on the smaller screen.
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TEDxWarwick: Feeding the City, Feeding the Mind
Click on the image to see the video of my TEDxWarwick talk.
The full text of is below, along with a sample of the few slides I used:
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Birmingham’s population fed from locally-grown produce?
If Birmingham were to source its food locally, how large a catchment area would we need?
Could Herefordshire beef, Cotswold sheep, Vale of Evesham fruit and vegetables and the arable lands of Shropshire and Warwickshire supply us with enough food?
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Organic food, global food security & what the heck should we do?
Feeding the world’s population presents hard intellectual challenges, starkly illustrated in the issues around organic produce.
We need intensify agricultural practice in order to feed the nine or ten billion people that will, barring catastrophe or cataclysm of some kind, be alive in 2050.
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TNO March update
Here’s the March update from the New Optimists Forum.
Lots of stuff has happened, including three important developments very recently:
- The publication of The readiness is all: What it takes to feed the city, the second of the Birmingham Scenarios Reports.
- The news that Birmingham City Council are making the expansion of district energy networks their top green priority.
- TNO spin-off Growing Birmingham has brought The Big Dig to Birmingham.
The readiness is all: What it takes to feed a city
The second of the Birmingham Scenarios Reports, The readiness is all: What it takes to feed a city is published today.
Earlier drafts were commented on by the UK’s Global Food Security Champion, Professor Tim Benton and several New Optimists scientists: Professor Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston, Dr Rosemary Collier, Professor Laura Green, Dr Rob Lillywhite and Professor David Pink — and we’re very grateful to them for their really helpful contributions.
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TNO Forum latest update published
There’s been some great stuff happening over the last couple of months, all reported in the January Forum update.
The image here is a montage of stills created from the filming of the 1st December workshop at Birmingham Leadership Foundation.
This was a thrilling beginning to create “narrativium” to populate the scenarios. We’re now writing an Arts Council bid to continue this work.
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TNO Response to the Birmingham Development Plan 2031
We’ve responded today to the draft Birmingham Development Plan 2031 — the deadline is Monday (14th January), and published a copy of it here.
The final version of the Development Plan is a hugely influential document, setting out the strategic objectives for planning permissions in the city over the next 25 years. Sure, revised every five years, but nonetheless hugely influential.
If you make a submission to this draft Plan 2031, the City Council has to respond.
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Narrativium for the Birmingham 2050 scenarios
With the wealth of info from all the Forum’s 2012 activities, we’ve created this “54-matrix” to generate ‘narrativium, multi-media stories of possible food futures for Birmingham 2050.
This 54-matrix shows glimpses of possible futures — and here’s how to ‘read’ it:
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Putting ideas (and food) on the table – food scenarios for Birmingham 2050 #TNOfood
The participants came up with ideas and scenarios in small groups which they recorded on tablecloths. They then presented the ideas to the rest of the group, using a range of approaches and media.
These different forms included a drama piece which segued from a food-related criminal investigation in a police station to a family scene which imagined a period of rationing, covering ideas such as animal and even humans being eaten as a source of food in the future.
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