Transition Richmond Borough

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

A Transition Initiative is a community 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)?"

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.

A Steering Group of local people has now formed itself to take forward work on facilitate a "Transition Town" model in the borough. How this is to take shape is yet to become apparent but we are keen to talk to anyone who would be interested in getting involved in this exciting project. The group will be looking to raise awareness of peak oil and climate change whilst also providing an opportunity to think about our future locally and what the community can do increase its own resilience to these threats.

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. 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 are oil prices doing? On the 20th Feb 2008 oil traded at $100 a barrel for the first time, on April 25th 2008 oil trading hit $118 a barrel. On the 6th June oil hit $139 a barrel with Morgan Stanley predicting that to rise to $150 by the 4th of July 2008.

For more information about Transition Towns see

http://www.transitiontowns.org/

http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork

REN Team 09.06.08