Peter Evans opens the 2010 Chepstow Festival event, ‘Looking Up In the Downturn’.
The Health & Consciousness Group exists as a forum at which interested members of the public together with active members of Transition Chepstow meet to explore and discuss issues of fundamental significance to holistic human health, environmental awareness and personal consciousness.
Our role as individual, communal and political co-creators in promoting human well-being and sustaining an ecological balance with nature in an era of rapid planetary climate change and resource depletion, is of paramount importance in the forthcoming decades.
The Health & Consciousness Group meetings are usually held monthly on Thursdays, 7.30 – 9pm, at the Coach and Horses Inn, Welsh Street, Chepstow.
The special Chepstow Festival 2012 meeting of the Health & Consciousness Group was held on -
Tuesday 10th July 2012, 7.30pm
Chepstow Methodist Church Hall
Transition Chepstow Festival Talks & Public Forum
Climate Change: Sustaining Environmental and Social Resilience
Susan Baker: Professor Cardiff University School of Social Sciences
Janet Rawlings: Chairwoman Transition Chepstow Steering Group
Will McLean: Strategic Partnership and Engagement Lead
Monmouthshire County Council
Peter Evans: Panel Chairman
Contact:
Peter Evans – sustainablehealth@transitionchepstow.org.uk
The second of the customary Transition Chepstow Festival events initiated by Transition Chepstow Health and Consciousness Group was chaired by the coordinator Dr Peter Evans.
The tripartite guest speakers represented interested stakeholder groups drawn from the local Chepstow community, academia and local government.
How individuals, communities and governments are currently responding, and also how everyone will need to cooperatively, rapidly and positively adapt to the environmental and social challenges that lie ahead of us all, is problematic and crucial. Central to this strategy is the requirement to build resilience into all aspects of the political response to adverse environmental pressures so as to ensure that a sustainable and civilised human and biosociety continues to flourish in the future.
The participation of the audience in the subsequent public forum session with questions and comments to the guest speakers, indicated the important and partisan nature of such public debate in illuminating, and hopefully resolving, the many vital issues associated with climate change.
Thanks were expressed to the financial sponsors Cohesive Communications Ltd. and to the Methodist Church for hosting the event.
See also Transition Chepstow Events page for current details.
New participants and old faces, all are welcome to attend the FREE public events.
Transition Chepstow Health and Consciousness Group : Society Report
The topic at the recent meeting of the Transition Chepstow Health & Consciousness Group was:-
Happiness: Human Right, Responsibility and Response. The wide-ranging stimulating discussion covered the nature, value and attainment of personal happiness and contentment in a world of evident increasing economic pressures, military conflicts and major natural disasters. Likewise, the psychological, political and philosophical aspects of happiness and its meaning, were also addressed.
Associated with the apparent incessant proliferation of adverse news, thus rendering individuals vulnerable to negative feelings and loss of hope, the prevalence and incidence of personal anxiety and depression is increasing worldwide. Emerging evidence indicates peoples state of health is frequently directly associated with their positive feelings of happiness.
The singular obsession with economic measures, namely Gross Domestic Project (GDP), as the sole and sufficient indicator of a nation’s status, is being challenged by the proposed introduction by the government of an additional and alternative index of the population’s health and social wealth. Commencing in April 2011, the Office of National Statistics will be undertaking the National Wellbeing Project and surveying people’s health, happiness and quality of life indicators relating to education, supportive relationships, and cultural activities.
The initiative has been welcomed by the New Economics Foundation as a positive step towards fully assessing the successful outcome of government policy and their particular impact on broader and vital personal, social and environmental matters.
For a list of previous events click here.
