Transition Towns (expanded)

We on the engaged and progressive end of the spectrum spend a lot of time writing about many of the things going wrong in the world, but seemingly little on solutions beyond what we'd like to see. So I'm going make a point of occassionally posting on actionable measures in existence now as a positive counterbalance to all that informed complaining. I'm not saying that complaining needs to be stopped, but I sense a need for more frequent constructive commentary. Some of this stuff is might be familiar to some readers, but to others maybe not; we get many more hits than comments and who knows what someone will pick up on. If you've got any suggestions, have-at'er in the comments.

Assorted wingnuts will naturally nonsensically natter on about the islamofacsist commie hippie terrorist liberal treasonous conspiratorial nature of it all, but fuck'm. It ain't their world anymore.

Transition Towns:

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 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.

Video: International Forum on Globalisation Rob Hopkins Part 1 of 3 [The rest are on Youtube]



ADDED: And another one - same dude.





(Cheers Dana!)