Website of the Day: Transition Towns

Transition town is a term that keeps popping up when you start checking out alternatives. As it is something of an innovation, and perhaps rather mysterious one at that, today’s offering is the result of an attempt to find out what it is all about, for those not already familiar.

Transition Towns turns out to be a community based, bottom-up movement. Each community aims to develop an ‘Energy Descent Action Plan’ to prepare for and respond to the twin crises foreseen approaching – energy scarcity and climate change.

Much of the emphasis is on the concept of ‘Peak Oil’ – that we have lived through a period that started around 1960 in which energy supplies were more or less inexhaustible and at ever lower prices – which is now coming to an end.

The whole movement is conceptualised in Permaculture terms, so it is no surprise that both the solutions typically envisaged and the processes for arriving at them are conceived along those lines. Not that there is anything inherently wrong in that, as Permaculture is probably the most coherent response we have to the multiple challenges we now face.

These include a return to the local economy, moves towards sustainability and self-sufficiency, ecological building, low energy use, local food production and so forth.

Another key concept is ‘the great deskilling’. This refers to the fact that through socialisation and education society has produced a population of people very highly educated and incredibly skilled in all manner of extremely specialised things, all of which have only one thing in common – that they are all unfortunately absolutely useless from the point of view of survival – whilst simultaneously loosing almost completely in only a few generations their birthright of traditional skills, some of which have been passed down largely unchanged since the Stone Age or earlier, and that are indispensable to living harmoniously with the planet. How to grow and nuture, make and repair things, knowledge of the uses of the things of nature, how to live with the weather, the seasons, one’s own body. Things like that.

The ability to prepare food is the latest one phasing out, in favour of convenience foods and eating out, because people now consider themselves to be ‘too busy’ for such unworthwhile activities as cooking.

The net result is a population absolutely incapable of meeting any of its survival needs in any way whatsoever other than to buy them, and which is therefore totally dependent upon the system and condemned to a consumer lifestyle – in the true sense of the word – as a result. It therefore has no alternative than to work for money in whatever way the system requires.

It is a fundamental part of the problem, and has simply left people climbing over each other to get the most comfortable spots available within that model. For better or worse, from that point of view law has to be amongst the most desirable.


Transition Town status appears to be entirely independent of conventional local government, though there is great emphasis on the need to get it on side to get individual aspects of the plans put into practice, and hopefully to get the Energy Descent Action Plan endorsed and perhaps one day fully adopted. Only when there are sufficient local communities up and running in an area will the process be expanded on their backs to the regional level or higher.

It seems the movement started in Totnes, Devon, UK around summer 2006 and has gone on rapidly from there.

Within the UK, the site lists 22 places that have officially recognised as Transition Towns, and another 200 where initial processes are underway.

Elsewhere it identifies Transition Towns in France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Israel, Oz, New Zealand, Canada and the USA.

Oakland, California, USA is listed as the front runner to be the first Transition City.


The main site is a wiki still under development. It also links to the websites of the Transition Towns individually. The most useful page to start at is

http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork

where the links top right lead to some interesting stuff.


There is a telling illustration of how money haemorrhages from the local economy if you don’t shop locally, quantified at

http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/LeakyEconomy


Finally an article about the movement from the Guardian of 19 April 2007 is at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/apr/19/energy.ethicalliving



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