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Old 10-17-2008, 08:04 PM   #1
quest
Avalon Senior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: earth holland
Posts: 104
Default stop whining now & get started with 'transition initiatives'

probably mentioned elsewhere on this site, no excuses anymore.

http://www.transitiontowns.org

What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?
It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?

They begin by forming an initiating group and then adopt the Transition Model (explained here at length, and in bits here and here) with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative.

A Transition Initiative is a community (lots of examples here) working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:

"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"
After going through a comprehensive and creative process of:

awareness raising around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a community lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon
connecting with existing groups in the community
building bridges to local government
connecting with other transition initiatives
forming groups to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc)
kicking off projects aimed at building people's understanding of resilience and carbon issues and community engagement
eventually launching a community defined, community implemented "Energy Descent Action Plan" over a 15 to 20 year timescale
This results in a coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life that strives to rebuild the resilience we've lost as a result of cheap oil and reduce the community's carbon emissions drastically.

The community also recognises two crucial points:

that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there's no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope
if we collectively plan and act early enough there's every likelihood that we can create a way of living that's significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.
If you want to find out more, check out the other menu items on the left hand site of the page.

!! Cheerful disclaimer! Just in case you were under the mistaken impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact.

We truly don't know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.

On the other hand, everything that you read on this site is the result of real work in the real world and hearty community engagement. There's not an ivory tower in sight, no professors in musty oak-panelled studies churning out erudite papers, no slavish adherence to a model carved in stone.

This site, just like the transition model, is brought to you by people who are actively engaged in transition in a community. People who are learning by doing - and learning all the time. People who understand that we can't sit back and wait for someone else to do the work. People like you, perhaps...

http://www.transitiontowns.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGHrW...eature=related

Founder of the Transition Network spreading throughout the world, Rob Hopkins talks about Transition Town Totnes and moving towards a post-peak oil society. His book The Transition Handbook gives an account of the founding of Transition Town Totnes, and the global spread of Transition towns. He shows you how to start the Transition process in your community, and why it is important that communities are resilient to the coming decline of oil as an energy source. He also includes the facts about peak oil, and puts a persuasive argument for acting now, rather than later. See www.greenbooks.co.uk for 'The Transition Handbook: from Oil Dependency to Local Resilience'.
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