Welcome to Transition Towns, Cities, Villages and Islands!
This website is a WIKI for use by all the communities that have adopted the Transition Model for responding to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change.
This site provides a focal point for all of these towns, villages, cities and localities around the world as they implement their own Transition Initiative.
Some groups are using this as their main website for organising, recording progress and communicating with their own community. Others have their own website and simply link to it from the menu on the left hand side of this page.
Transition Network
This site is also the home of the Transition Network - the mission of our embryonic charity is to inspire, encourage, network, support and train communities as they consider, adopt and implement a Transition Initiative. We're building a range of materials, training courses, events, tools & techniques, resources and a general support capability to help these communities.
It's early days, so we have a long way to go. But we understand how massive the task is, and we're giving it everything we've got. Recent funding from Tudor Trust and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation has put us on very firm footing for our work right from this early stage.
What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?
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.
Starting off your own Transition Initiative
The list of official Transition Initiatives is here. We hope many more will join them as the world wakes up to the twin threats of Peak Oil and Climate Change.
If you want to find out more about setting up a Transition Initiative in your community, please contact us at the Transition Network.
We can offer support in the following ways:
- Comprehensive 40 page pdf Transition Initiatives Primer to set you off on this journey. Includes the following sections:
- peak oil introduction
- checklist for building a robust core team
- 7 "Buts"
- 12 Steps
- role of local government
- movies for awareness raising (reviews, where to get them, licensing requirements)
- getting businesses involved
- questions of leadership and structure
- recommended reading list for peak oil and climate change
- Website with frequently updated content
- Newsletter
- Advice and guidance on how to start up and develop your Transition Initiative
- A generic flyer which will identify your project as a Transition Town project and reduce your graphic design costs
- Access to graphic design at reduced cost for your Transition logo (eg in the style of Totnes and Lewes)
- Help with designing your Unleashing event to get your initiative off to a good start
- Once you've worked on the checklist and you're an "official" initiative, we'll give you space on this fully-enabled wiki website, with your own "transitiontowns.org/your-town" web address
- Transition Training
- We're also working on a networking platform that will connect people and initiatives on a geographical and a specialty dimensions
We're hoping that through this work, communities across the UK will unleash their own collective genius and embark on an imaginative and practical range of connected initiatives, leading to a way of life that is more resilient, more fulfilling and more equitable, and that has dramatically lower levels of carbon emissions.
Using a WIKI
If you've never used a WIKI before, please practice in the Sandbox
List of all Pages WIKI.
Want to see everything in this WIKI? - click here to see a list.
To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible.
—Benjamin Franklin
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