Emergence Summit 2012: Creating the Future

A major arts and sustainability event presented by Volcano and The Centre for Alternative Technology in September 2012.

NOW ONLINE! EMERGENCE VIDEOS!

Film of the Land Journey on Culture Colony (65 mins)

Robert Newman: Capitalism V An Inhabitable Planet (36 mins) 

Nick Capaldi:The Role of the Arts in Creating the Future (22 mins)

The Case for Optimism, Swansea (6 minutes)

The Summit took place from 1-9 September 2012. It began with a land journey on foot through Wales, and converged upon an international conference of leaders, thinkers and visionaries at CAT's extraordinary site in mid-Wales. The blog from the event is here.

The purpose of The Summit is to reach across a gulf. Not a gulf between people, or between disciplines, but the much greater gulf between our objective understanding of the scale of the challenge facing humankind, and our ability to imagine a positive, practical future in which we have risen to that challenge and found new ways of living.

We know that this positive future is technically possible. One of the things that CAT brings to the Summit is Zero Carbon Britain - a  body of work and a wealth of resources that describe how we might bring about a zero-carbon future using existing technologies. We have the technologies we need: the main challenges now are much more social and political.

If people are unable to imagine a positive future, they won’t create it.

The role of the Emergence Summit is to create a space where inspiration, optimism and the possibility of change can be nurtured, and practical action planned.