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

A Transition Initiative is a community that seeks to face up to the dual challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change and to discover ways to address this BIG question:

For all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive (e.g. food, education, business, environment, community, etc.) how do we significantly increase resilience (to reduce the effects of rising oil prices) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to reduce the effects of climate change)?

The aim is to generate a range of projects across these areas which lead to a collectively designed energy descent action plan.  The working title for Oxford's version of this document is "Transition Oxford – The Plan".

Transition Towns also recognise 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 one that we find ourselves on today

Read (much) more about Transition Towns ...  

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