What are Transition Towns or Transition initiatives?
The Transition movement grew out of a permaculture course in Kinsale, Ireland, taught by Rob Hopkins. Students produced the first 'energy descent action plan' describing how the community would wean itself off its oil dependency over a 20 year period. The first UK Transition project followed in Totnes, Devon. A Transition initiative, on whatever scale, aims to tackle at a local level, two related problems - climate change and 'peak oil'
Communities around the developed world are now rapidly signing up to use the Transition model and work towards a lower energy and re- localised way of life, in response to a growing recognition that our current way of life is simply unsustainable.
In the UK, Brixton, Brighton, Norwich and York are some of the cities and urban areas using the Transition model and hundreds of smaller towns and villages are starting Transition projects, supported by the Transition Network
The USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand and other European countries are all developing networks to support their transitioning communities.
A bit about permaculture, from the Permaculture Association website:
'Permaculture combines three key aspects:
1. an ethical framework
2. understandings of how nature works, and
3. a design approach
This unique combination is then used to support the creation of
sustainable, agriculturally productive, non-polluting and healthy
settlements. In many places this means adapting our existing
settlements. In other cases it can mean starting from scratch. Both
offer interesting challenges and opportunities.
The word 'permaculture' comes from 'permanent agriculture' and 'permanent culture'
- it is about living lightly on the planet, and making sure that we can
sustain human activities for many generations to come, in harmony with
nature. Permanence is not about everything staying the same. Its about
stability, about deepening soils and cleaner water, thriving
communities in self-reliant regions, biodiverse agriculture and social
justice, peace and abundance.
One thing is for sure. Its a fascinating subject, with many aspects,
and its still evolving....'
Peak Oil
http://www.peakoil.net
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer
Most people already know about climate change, but the second issue, 'peak oil', is much less widely known about - see the above links for more info. Every oil field eventually reaches a peak in production after which output declines. Oil production has already peaked in 64 of the world's 98 oil producing countries, and many independent experts believe the global oil peak is starting to occur.
Oil discovery peaked in the mid 1960s. We now discover 1 new barrel for every 5 or 6 consumed. The light, clean, easy to extract oil has mostly been extracted, leaving the heavier, more contaminated, more inaccessible oil left to extract. Newer discoveries are expensive to extract and refine due to their location eg deep ocean, coal tar sands. All of this, together with world population growth and rocketing demand, means there will start to be a growing gap in world supply; and this means an imminent end to the era of cheap and plentiful oil.
Our economy and food systems have become totally reliant on transportation. It takes around 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of our food - not including transportation. Most agro-industry fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are made from oil and gas. There are 30 million private cars plus commercial vehicles and trucks on the road. Our way of life is totally dependent on cheap liquid fuels. Biofuels are not the answer - in order to replace transportation fuel alone for the UK's current needs we would need around 4 times our land mass or 64 nuclear power plants! Nevermind replacing the heating fuel, plastics, fertlizers, road building materials, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, toys and so on, that oil provides.
Transition - the process
Read the Transition Network's Primer for an excellent overview of Transition - the background, process etc
The process itself, in a nutshell:
The aim of a Transition initiative is to pull a community together to explore practical ways of cutting carbon emissions and rebuilding resilience - the capacity to live with less (or no) oil and its numerous by-products. While each community will do this in it's own way, there is already evidence from the many established Transition groups of what is working well, and this process is, broadly, as described below:
1 First, the project's initiating group work to increase awareness of the key issues through local film shows, talks, discussions and events. Alongside this it is crucial to build links with local groups, local government and other organisations.
2 At a stage when wider community interest is seen to be taking off, the project is 'unleashed' into the community with an official launch event. At this point the project will go where the community wants it to go, there is no right or wrong way.
3 At this stage there is the opportunity for many more people to get actively involved in groups to look at specific aspects of community life, e.g. energy, food production, transport, the local economy and so on. Of course, these groups may already have started to form during earlier stages of the project.
4 Over a period of a year or so, these new groups will research the current local situation for their topic area, develop a vision of how a more resilient - 20 year distant - future will look and then describe steps and activities that need to happen in order to arrive at that future situation.
5 Representatives from the new groups replace the original initiating group, to form a new steering group for the whole project.
6 The work of these groups is then pulled together into an Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP), a 'blueprint' to reduce a community's carbon footprint while increasing local resilience over a period or 20 years or so. The plan will describe activities against a timescale and how these will be delivered.
Some of the activities being started up by Transition projects as they work on areas of the EDAP include community food growing; land-share schemes to pair up those wanting to grow food with landowners offering space; launching local currencies to boost the local economy; setting up locally owned renewable energy companies; local car-share and bike clubs and running courses covering a wide range of skills.