■The Roots of Transition Towns
The Transition Network began in the mind of Rob Hopkins, a lecturer on permaculture, in Totnes, a small town in Southern England, in the autumn of 2005.
People who shared an interest and passion came together, and an initial group was formed. They held film screenings, courses on re-skilling in basic life skills, designed natural energy projects and even issued a local currency.
Building co-operative links with related groups, businesses, and public bodies, the Transition Movement quickly involved the whole area.
■What are Transition Town activities?
Transition Towns promote practical activities which make an area more resilient, and allow the people to demonstrate their individual creativity.
Just by changing our daily lifestyle a little, we can have more fun, abundance and freedom.
Transition activities make this change right within the community. They’re practical and collaborative.
Through all these practical activities, we make our local areas easier to live in, more resilient to crises, and places where everybody can join in. It’s a grassroots movement.
■The Thinking behind Transition Activities
Energy and Food
Heart, Mind, Body and Health
Climate Change and Environmental Change
Social Inequality and the increase in people excluded from society
We can’t click our fingers and magically resolve all the problems that need solutions, or the many difficulties we face in today’s society.
But perhaps if we make out local communities stronger, and think and act together, we can simultaneously resolve those kinds of problems. This is the thinking behind the Transition Network.
■What is Transition?
A “Transition” is a process of change from one state to another. What are we transitioning from, and what are we transitioning to?
We are transitioning from a fragile, brittle society, where we consume large quantities of energy, to a sustainable society which is flexible and resilient, where local people collaborate.
At first glance, a society where we use lots of energy may seem convenient and comfortable. But one can predict that once the energy supply stops, it will be very difficult for people just to survive. This is a fragile society where, if the energy stopped, the food in the supermarkets and the masses of manufactured goods would suddenly disappear or stop working.
Just making the right things in the right quantities, treating them with care, recycling things we have finished using or eating, and not seeing them as useless. To create this kind of society, we…
Co-operate with our friends in the area
Use local resources to produce energy
Create vegetable gardens and fields with the people in our areas
Raise awareness of issues in our society through study groups and film screenings
Revive skills passed down from long ago, which had been lost
Learn the wisdom of the past from the aged
Seek out a different way of living.
This is Transition.