TTK News
June 2008: KINSALE DEVELOPMENT PLAN
Kinsale Town Council has appointed Colin Buchanan and Partners Ltd. Consultants to review the Kinsale Development Plan. The 2009-2015 Plan is currently being drafted and TTK were pleased to be part of the consultation process. We met up with Alice Charles and Damien O’Tuama of Colin Buchanan and outlined our vision for Kinsale as a town with a reduced dependency on fossil fuels, a reduced carbon footprint and an increased resilience in order to continue to thrive as a vibrant sustainable community.
TRANSITION TOURISTS
A fascinating Conference on Biofuels and Food Security was held recently in Cork by Ethical Development Action, a newly formed group, with whom TTK will be liaising in the near future. The day after the conference, some of the members and speakers came to Kinsale to do some sight seeing. Camilla Moreno, from Brazil who spoke eloquently on ‘Biofuels in Brazil and South America’, was especially keen to see the world’s first Transition Town, and thought Ireland was the perfect size to become a completely sustainable country. She said Transition Towns were now developing in Brazil and she had watched with interest as the movement evolved and spread around the globe.
The visitors were shown the College of Further Education with its sustainable buildings and Permaculture demonstrations and were suitably impressed. Negusu Aklilu, from Ethiopia, was very interested in Permaculture design, saying that it could be applied in his home country to help alleviate the problems of drought and hunger.
January 2008: TTK Awarded another Local Agenda 21 Grant
For the second year running, Transition Town Kinsale has won a Local Agenda 21 grant. The Department of the Environment, in conjunction with Cork County Council has allocated €1,500 towards our sustainability centre. Now, while we don’t actually have a sustainability centre yet, we will use the funds to purchase some office equipment which will help make the running of TTK events and projects that little bit easier and which will end up in our sustainability centre eventually.
Local Agenda 21 is a process for supporting sustainable development at local and community levels and was adopted by more than 178 governments at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992.
September 2007: NO WILLITS TWINNING
We were very disappointed to hear that the Town Council turned down a request from Willits, a town in northern California, to twin with Kinsale. Willits, with its population of about 12,000, might be called America’s first Transition Town only it doesn’t use that moniker. Like TTK, it understands the challenge of peak oil, and in preparation for that, its mission is ‘to foster the creation of a sustainable, local economy based on the principles of sufficiency, responsibility and life promoting actions’.
Relations with Willits are already well established and we have had a number of visits from members of the community giving us advice on how to move towards a low carbon future and improve community resilience and sustainability. While we understand that Willits is a long way (and mucho carbon emissions) away, a twinning link would have served both communities well and much of it could have been carried out online. Willits features prominently in ‘Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream’, the sequel to ‘The End of Suburbia’, the first film to deal head-on with the subject of Peak Oil. The new film takes a look at some of the solutions and it is inspiring to see many residents of Willits, from the local sheriff to the head of the Chamber of Commerce, all clued in to and expressing views on the concepts of Peak Oil, and community sustainability.