What can history teach us for the task of rapid transition in the face of climate change and corrosive inequality? Historian Molly Conisbee, a speaker at this week’s Transformations events at the Hay Festival, has written about how communities adapted during Britain’s dramatic urban growth and upheaval in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In a blogpost for the New Weather Institute, Molly reveals how people shared idle assets, reducing the need for ‘stuff’ and spread financial risks, for example by setting up women-run ‘Weather Clubs’ used for mutual saving. The struggle for greater economic, political and social equality, she finds, must be at the core of any resilient or rapid transition.
Read Molly’s full blogpost on the New Weather Institute website