Vision or business as usual?

According to Einstein, intuition is the most important thing. Sometimes you just know. Like Virgin airline boss Richard Branson offering a $25 million prize for the first scientist to come up with a technology that removes carbon from the air. That’s just wrong. Intuitively, morally - are they the same? Like our District Council’s planning department last Friday putting Angel Properties together with 19 stakeholders who without exception are people the developer has consulted, and calling it a Visioning for the North Street area. That’s just wrong, isn’t it?

Apart from anything else I’m disappointed with our elected officers for hijacking the precious V word. I could lobby, protest and write things like this, but I don’t want to. Having paddled in the waters of spin, greed and denial the last few weeks, I’ve decided that this is not my bag. It’s there; it runs the show. For now. But what I’m most interested in is the twin sister. Hope, truth, honesty. Intuition. Vision.

Real vision is what I experienced at the first event of Transition Town Lewes last Sunday. End of Suburbia was documentary film about a post-peak oil future that was both shocking and strangely encouraging. Afterwards, the 81 people who attended stuck up post-it notes: ‘One step I can take’, ‘One step Lewes can take’, ‘One step government can take’. The intentions, collated and emailed back to the filmgoers and now on the Transition Town Wiki page, are beautiful, juicy with personal vision and hope. That’s the reality I choose.