Transition towns plan a gentle descent from oil dependence—and have a blast doing it.

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




Skill Up, Party Down
Transition Towns plan a gentle descent from oil dependence—and have a blast in the process.

by Mason Inman


Ciaran Mundy, a successful high-tech entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in soil ecology, started a website to update people on all the “terrible news about climate change.” But after a while, he felt it wasn’t working—that it would never work. “It took me years to realize there’s no point in putting up more facts and figures,” he says. “They just bounce off people.”

Then he stumbled across the Transition Town movement, which was just picking up steam in his city—Bristol, England. When Mundy attended a training session on Transition Towns, he found a group of people addressing the big problems of our time, and doing it with optimism and a sense of celebration.

The Transition movement is built around making the transition to a world after peak oil—the time when world oil production reaches an all-time high, then goes into irreversible decline. Oil prices will spike and the economy will stop growing, wreaking havoc in our society, which depends on petroleum for nearly everything, from growing food to maintaining economies. The Transition movement aims to prepare communities for peak oil—or climate change, or economic meltdown—by reclaiming lost skills, teaching new ones, and fostering local self-sufficiency.

The movement’s approach and attitude, as much as its goals, galvanized Mundy. “It’s not about being angsty, and doing worthy things. It’s about celebrating,” he says. “I like parties—I’m a bit of a party animal,” he adds with a grin. “So it’s perfect for me.”

Starting the Transition

Transition Towns started in 2005 as a community project led by Rob Hopkins, who was teaching permaculture in a rural Irish town called Kinsale. The year before, he and his class watched a new movie, The End of Suburbia, that said peak oil will completely transform our lives. “It greatly focused the mind and came as a great shock to everyone—myself included,” Hopkins writes in The Transition Handbook, the movement’s bible. He added a project to his course to imagine how Kinsale “might successfully make the transition to a lower-energy future.” ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-resilient-community/party-down