What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?

A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look at 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)?"

The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway.

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 down slope
• 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.

Peak Oil? Simply peak oil is when the production of oil peaks and then starts to fall but demand continues to rise resulting in oil prices increases. It is not about oil running out but this fall in production and increase in demand. For more information about peak oil:

http://www.peakoil.net/about-peak-oil

What the oil industry is saying http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/apr/21/oilandpetrol.news

What is happening locally?

Richmond Environment Network will provide support and development to any local transition groups that develop. We are currently collecting contact details of anybody interested and these will be passed to any transition groups that develop. Please use our Contact Us form and tick the relevant box.

For more information about Transition Towns see

http://www.transitiontowns.org/

http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork