2012 Transition Challenge from TransitionUS

For the entire month of May, thousands of average citizens from around the country will work together to create new gardens, green their homes and build community resilience. Abandoned lots will be converted into green oases and school children will pull weeds and plant tomato starts. Whole communities will pick up shovels and tools to help construct rainwater harvesting systems, install solar panels, make energy efficiency improvements, and share garden know-how with their friends and neighbors.  All while educating and empowering community, and supporting local businesses.

You as an individual in your community can identify specific actions in one or more of the four challenge areas: food, water, energy, community and/or you can volunteer on a community project. All we ask is that you register your action so we can show the world just how powerful we are as a movement then check out the Actions Map to see who else is taking on the challenge.

Here are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing …

convert your lawn (or patio/balcony) to grow food

plant a fruit tree

create an herb garden

grow a row for a local food bank

start a worm bin or compost

install low flow

set up a greywater system

harvest rainwater

switch to drip irrigation

hang a clothes line

conduct a home energy audit

unplug and tune-in to Nature

have a block party and share stories

help a neighbor meet the Challenge

Join the thousands of people taking the Transition Challenge this May. There are any number of actions you can take to improve the place where you live while at the same time showing support for local businesses & efforts, educating & raising awareness, building community and empowering youth.

Pick up your shovels and tools. Help construct rainwater harvesting systems. Install solar panels. Make energy efficiency improvements, and share garden know-how with their friends and neighbors. Have a potluck!

This is an opportunity to promote and increase participation in city and county programs for lawn removal, greywater and healthy food while creating innovative demonstration gardens in communities ranging from front yards to apartment patios, city landscapes, schools, churches, organizations and businesses.

Sound inspiring? Register your action so we can show the world just how powerful we are as a movement then check out the Actions Map to see who else is taking on the challenge.

In 2011 we logged over 1,500 actions. This year we are aiming for 2,012!

Organizing a Challenge in your town (or city, village, county, parish, island) not only helps raise awareness and continues to build local resilience, it offers an opportunity for your citizens to be a part of something much larger. This is the perfect opportunity for communities across the country to come together and show their solidarity.

Be sure to check out last year’s challenge summary.

Double your impact and support 350.org global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th. Register your action for the Transition Challenge AND for the Climate Impacts Day! (Yes you will need to register on both websites…a few worthwhile moments to tell your story even more widely).

Just wanted to send the word out that our household is going to be fasting from fossil fuels again this month!

Under the inward energy of a near new moon we will be flipping our breaker, abstaining from driving, and cooking on the hearth this coming Sun. April 22 (Earth Day!).

If this sounds like a good idea to you please consider joining us in a day of exploring our dependence on convenience fuels and reconnecting with other potent power sources. We will be sharing food from our hearth and stories of the day for anyone participating in the fast who wants to join us in our candle lit home.

If you are too far away to visit our hearth by foot or bike consider enrolling your neighbors in fuel fasting for a day and sharing an evening meal together.

For stories from our last adventure in the dark please check out our new household blog  (http://handsandhearth.wordpress.com/).

“All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.”  -John Ruskin

Molly, Jordan, Maggie, Luke

Reflections on Energy Descent Action Plans, by Rob Hopkins, posted 15 Mar 2012, transitionculture.org.

graphic by Transition L.A.

A fascinating post over at Leaving Babylon by Vera Bradova called Tedium and black magic: the trouble with Energy Descent Action Plans (EDAPs) raises some interesting questions about Transition and planning, and EDAPs in particular.  The version published at EnergyBulletin.net pulls out some of the most salient comments.   It offers a very good opportunity to revisit the role of the EDAP in Transition, and how that has changed over time, an issue I am very grateful to her for raising.

At the heart of Bradova’s article is a sense that EDAPs represent a rigid planning for the future, akin to the planners of the 1950s who planned, and then executed, their big bold vision for post-war cities, even when it began to become clear that there were flaws in what they were doing.  She argues that Transition “went whole hog for planning,” and that this became the principal raison d’etre for Transition groups.  This is absolutely not my experience, as I hope to explore here.

Her article raises several important issues I think.  The first is that, as she acknowledges, she has yet to read ‘The Transition Companion’, the latest setting out of Transition.  The Companion is a complete revision of how Transition is presented, a sea change from the Handbook.  Much of her critique is based on the assumption that creating an EDAP is the objective of a Transition group, as presented in the Handbook.

The Companion takes a very different approach, arguing that an EDAP is but one of many ingredients that an initiative can pick up and do if it feels it would be useful (see that ingredient here).  Clearly for many Transition initiatives on the ground it doesn’t feel like a useful thing to put time into, given that 6 years into Transition you can count the number of completed EDAPs on one hand.  That’s not to say though that the entire concept of applying some intentional design to the challenges we face is of no value.

The original idea behind EDAPs was that the scale of what we need to do (reconfigure the places we live for a post peak money, peak oil, climate responsible world) is such, and the resources available for us to do it so small, and decreasing, that we need to think carefully about the best way to apply our energy and available resources to making it happen.  It is, in effect, a design project, rather than a planning project.  Here is a short film, that was an extra on the DVD of ‘In Transition 2.0′, about the Totnes EDAP process which gives a sense of the project and the spirit of it:

What Transition tries to bring to the debates around how we move to a more sustainable world is the suggestion that while it is great to start doing loads of projects, and as Vera argues, Incredible Edible Todmorden is a wonderful example of that,  it is also important to think about how the initiatives you kick off can build together in a more strategic way.  This doesn’t mean some Stalinist-style central planning approach, but can mean an element of intentional design.  Vera quotes Lewis Mumford in order to show a healthier approach to planning, but actually gives a more accurate description of how Transition initiatives are already approaches planning for the future:

“Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal: it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful so that they generate a complex, final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern. Towns like Siena illustrate this process to perfection.”

This feels to me to far better represent what Transition does than the rigid approach Vera attributes to it.  Permaculture design has long been one of the original foundations of Transition, and it takes an approach to design which isn’t rigid in the way she describes.  As a permaculture teacher I would teach people that the design process had the following steps, known as OBREDIM:

• Observation
• Boundaries
• Resources
• Evaluation
• Design
• Implementation
• Maintenance.

I also taught it as OBREDIMET, adding Evaluation and Tweaking onto the end, the idea that it is constantly being reviewed and adjusted.  It is this kind of active learning and ongoing reflection that is at the heart of an EDAP.

Vera writes in one of her comments in the thread that “I am not against strategic thinking per se; I am against strategic thinking as a big preamble to doing”, but this is really a misunderstanding of Transition.  Strategic thinking is never seen, or presented, as “a big preamble to doing”.  There is a huge amount to be said for just getting started and doing stuff, indeed it is what most initiatives do.   There is certainly no sense that they have to have done huge amounts of planning before they can plant a tree, forming groups, organise events, or whatever.  Hopefully yesterday’s post gave a sense of how important it is to just get started and start making things happen.
What we are seeing emerging from this global experiment that is Transition is a range of approaches.  Transition Town Brixton is a great example of a project-led initiative.  All kinds of projects have emerged, the Brixton Pound, Brixton Energy, food growing projects and so on, and as they emerge they support each other and work together as strategically as possible.  They have thought about, and decided against, doing an EDAP, preferring instead to drive forward on projects.

In Totnes, from Day 1 there have been numerous projects underway, and the EDAP ran alongside those, rather than everything being put on hold for 18 months while the EDAP was created.  The EDAP helped to identify a number of key initiatives, and a clear narrative, as well as some very useful and dynamic pieces of research.  Now a lot of new things are emerging, enterprises, projects, but they are seen as part of a coherent and well-connected narrative.

Transition Norwich started with a number of projects, and then a few people who felt qualified and enthused to do so undertook a piece of research called ‘Can Norwich Feed Itself?’ which did some strategic thinking about how the localisation of food in the area might happen and what new infrastructure this would require.  This identified a number of key initiatives, some of which are now underway.  The key points here are firstly that strategic planning can come at any stage of the process, and secondly that Transition only works because it creates a space in which people can drive forward what they are passionate about.  It is, in this sense, a ‘do-ocracy’, that its evolution and stages are shaped by the people who are doing stuff.

If there is a group of people who are fired up about the idea of creating an EDAP, then it’ll happen and will become a useful focus for the group.  It needn’t be a huge document in order to be useful, as the Dunbar EDAP (see right, above) demonstrated.  If no-one wants to do it, it won’t happen, and that’s fine too.  As energy builds from the projects and the impact they are having, it is likely that discussions will start to emerge about how they might be seen in an more strategic context, hence the ingredient on Strategic Thinking appearing in Stage 4 of Transition in the Transition Companion.  It is important to restate here that no-one knows how to do this, which approaches are best.  It is for the initiatives themselves to figure this out, to develop tools that work for them, not for me, not for Transition Network.

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In conversation with Transition US: a transcript

From Rob Hopkins’ blog, TransitionCulture.org:

5 Sep 2011

In July I did a ‘webinar’ thing with Richard Heinberg and Carolyne Stayton of Transition US, about how Transition is developing and about what will be contained in the ‘Transition Companion’.  With deepest gratitude to Rani of Transition Palo Alto, the poor soul who bravely transcribed it and must be utterly sick of the sound of my voice, here is the transcript.  We’ll be doing it all over again on September 12th, and you can hear the audio of the last one here. Maybe see you there.

Carolyne Stayton: Welcome everyone, this is Carolyne Stayton with Transition US. I’m here today with Richard Heinberg. Good morning to you Richard.
Richard Heinberg: Good morning Carolyne.

Carolyne: And Richard will be our host on the call today with Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement. And good afternoon to you Rob.

Rob Hopkins: Good afternoon-morning.

Carolyne: Ha, ha whatever it is.

Rob: Whichever.

Carolyne: I wanted to mention a few things now before we begin the program. One is that Rob’s new book, The Transition Companion, published in the US by Chelsea Green, is expected out, by October 24th I believe, and you can pre-order that through a link on our website, transitionus.org.

Carolyne Stayton (Transiton US)In the US, we now have 93 official Transition initiatives, and several hundreds forming. At this point, official or forming Transition initiatives are in almost all of the 50 states. For those who are mulling, it would be great for us to hear about you and your good work, so please go to our website, which links to the Transition Network and let us know who and where you are.

Join us again on September 12 for another conversation with Rob. Also join our Harvest Share, running September 21 to October 21 where we will measure pounds of food shared or hours volunteered in the process of sharing harvests.

Finally, we ask that you consider making a donation to Transition US so that we can keep on offering these types of programs. You can do that too by going to our website transitionus.org.

Our program today is structured along these lines: expect to be on the call about 75 minutes. For 20 minutes or so we get to hear Rob wax eloquently about highlights from the recent Transition conference and the Transition Movement. Then Richard will ask Rob questions based on those submitted by a number of you. Towards the end, and this is where it gets a little fuzzy in the possibilities, Richard and Rob might engage in some dialogue, or Richard and I might ask additional questions ourselves based on further questioning that we’ve received from all of you. It is possible that we will even have time to open the mic for a few calls, and we’ll see how that runs.

Richard Heinberg (Post Carbon Institute)

Now I wanted to introduce Richard Heinberg, our host for this call. Richard is the author of ten books, including his latest The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Senior fellow in residence at the Post Carbon Institute, Richard is best known as a leading educator on peak oil and the devastating impact it will have on our economic, food, and transport systems.

His new book argues that limits to debt, plus tightening natural resource constraints, mean that the era of economic growth, stretching back to the end of World War II, is at an end. However, if we adapt wisely, we can enjoy a higher quality of life even as we consume less. As a sought-after speaker, Richard has presented throughout the world, and has been featured on radio and television, and in documentaries including The End of Suburbia, and Leonard DiCaprio’s The Eleventh Hour. Richard, thank you so much for joining us today and hosting this call, and it is my pleasure to welcome you.

Richard: Thank you, Carolyne. It’s a pleasure for me to be on the call with so many Transition folks, and especially to have the opportunity to have this conversation with my friend Rob Hopkins.

For those who don’t know him, Rob is the originator of the Transition concept, and co-founder of the Transition Network. For the 11% on the call who don’t know what Transition is, we have the ideal person on the phone to tell us. He spent many years teaching permaculture, cob-building, mostly, when living in Ireland. He’s now based in Totnes, in Southern England. He’s a member of Transition Town Totnes, works part-time for Transition Network, publishes transitionculture.org, which, if you don’t have that website bookmarked on your computer, that’s a good thing to do.

Rob Hopkins (Transition)

He’s the author of the Transition Handbook: from Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, which came out in 2008. And he says, he spends generally far too much time thinking about Transition stuff. He is also a trustee of the Soil Association, the winner of the 2008 Schumacher Award, and a fellow of Ashoka International. He’s hard at work finishing up his new book, Transition Companion, which will be out in the US in October of this year.

So that’s enough introduction I guess. As Carolyne said, we wanted to start this call by hearing from Rob. There’s just been a Transition conference in the UK, and I imagine we would all like to hear a little description of what happened, and what the state of Transition initiatives is at the moment. So, Rob, why don’t you just take over the microphone and spend maybe 20 minutes bringing us up to date.

Rob: Thank you very much, and it’s lovely to be here. As some of you know, I gave up flying five years ago, so this is probably the closest I’ll get to having this kind of event in person. But it’s been wonderful over the last few years seeing how Transition has taken root in the US.

It’s been very very exciting to see that whole process unfold.

I have no idea how anybody should do Transition in the US. I can pass on some of the experience from here, but we’ve always imagined Transition from the beginning as being like a huge social experiment. What we’ve done is to create some simple tools, some simple principles, and an invitation to people to be part of an experiment on an enormous scale, and that’s really what’s happening.

For the 11% of you who don’t know what Transition is, basically it’s a bottom-up, grassroots-led response to peak oil and climate change, which is about making the places that we live more resilient, i.e. able to adapt to shocks, about making them more local, but seeing those as an enormous opportunity. Both Carolyne and Richard mentioned the Transition Companion. What we did five years ago and then with the Transition Handbook, was to put out the idea.

The Transition Handbook said, what would it look like if there was a movement all around the world of people doing this? In doing the book, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to look out at this network and see what people are doing, invite their stories, reflections, photographs, drawings, and so on and so on.

Within five years we’ve gone from just one initiative here in Totnes, in Devon, which I’m looking out on from here with rain and seagulls, to there being 375 official initiatives and 427 mulling initiatives. The indications we get from a number of places is that that’s not scratching the surface. There are many more who just haven’t let anybody know what they’re doing.

If you look on the map for Japan, for example, there are only two or three registered initiatives, but anecdotally we know there are about 40 groups working there. And this is in about 34 countries.

Transition has gone from an idea pulled together over pints in Devon pubs to an international phenomenon. It’s amazing and humbling to see that happening. Often we’ll sit around the computer here in the office and go, “Look at this! My God it’s absolutely extraordinary!”

In the Transition Handbook, and in the Primer, which was the first guide, we have the “Twelve Steps of Transition.” Early on people started turning up here in Totnes and saying “This is great, what are you doing exactly? And how does that work?” We really had no idea quite what we were doing – we were making it up as we went along and drawing together the tools and the ideas lying around us.

So we put together the 12 steps, which seemed to represent what we were doing. That was the state of the art when the first book came out.

But now, three years later, after looking around and seeing what people are actually doing, we became aware of the limitations of that as a model. Some people were feeling tied to a chronological “first you do this, then you do this” approach.

And also, in that model, the last of the 12 steps was to do an Energy Descent Action Plan, i.e. to write a community-led bottom-up Plan B for that place. Here in Totnes we did that last year. Strictly speaking we’re finished now and can go back to our daily lives and say, “Well, didn’t we have fun for the last three years?” But of course that’s really only the beginning of the whole process.

So we wanted to rewrite the Transition model in such a way that it was more reflective of what people are actually doing. What’s come out is the idea of Transition as a collection of ingredients and tools. In the same way that when people want to cook they look in at the same pantry full of ingredients, but they cook different things from them, we’ve come to see these ingredients as being solutions to problems encountered by communities trying to do the Transition process – solutions which we’ve seen happen enough times to have confidence that they are going to work.

The foreword to the book was written by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, a food activist and TV chef-guy over here. He said it’s like giving a great cake recipe to a dozen different cooks, and watching how their particular ingredients, techniques, and creative ideas produce subtly different results.

We’re not saying, you have to do this, then you have to do this. It’s really giving people the range of different things they can do. Although we do note that there are certain overall stages to it. Like when you are making a cake, you don’t just put the flour in a bowl, put it in the oven and expect to get a cake. You have to do the butter and the sugar first, then the eggs and then the flour, but there’s lots you can do within that.

So there are five stages we see in the Transition process:

Starting out, the process where you meet some friends and get together and say why don’t you do this?

And then Deepening, which is where you start to really connect it out and become an organization and start to something really meaningful.

Connecting, which is when you go much deeper in the community and build a broader coalition around what you’re doing.

And then there’s Building, which is one of the things that distinguishes the Transition approach, which is saying, “Look, if we’re serious about the intentional localization of this place and its economy, then we need to start being strategic and start scaling up what we do and our thinking.”

The fifth one is called Daring to Dream, which is about what would it look like if this is what happened everywhere, what does this look like at scale.

Doing the book led to hearing fantastic stories from different places. Lewes Sussex, which is one of the first Transition groups, have just covered the roof of their local brewery with 544 solar PV panels. They raised 310,000 pounds from a community share option in four weeks in order to do that. The brewery brewed a special commemorative beer called Sunshine Ale to celebrate. Two years before, when Transition Town Lewes launched the Lewes Pound, they launched a beer called Quid’s Inn to celebrate that as well.

Continue reading at TransitionCulture.org

Transition West Marin will be screening The Greenhorns, a new inspirational film about young people going into farming on 

Wednesday, August 17 at 6:30 pm  at the Point Reyes Presbyterian Church (11445 Shoreline Highway 1 – up the hill from the gas station).

 Discussion after the film with Mickey Murch and Will Scott from Bolinas, and Paige Phinney of Tara Firma Farms will be joining us.  Free Admission.  Donations for use of the church space – $1 or $2.

Please pass this on to young people interested in agriculture.  The average age of our farmers is 60 years old.  We need young people to see that farming is a rich, fulfilling vocation, albeit very hard work.  Facing the challenges and crises of peak oil, scarce resources, food and water security, Richard Heinberg says we will need 50 million young farmers.

The Greenhorns documentary film, completed after almost 3 years in production, explores the lives of America’s young farming community – its spirit, practices, and needs. It is the filmmaker’s hope that by broadcasting the stories and voices of these young farmers, we can build the case for those considering a career in agriculture – to embolden them, to entice them, and to recruit them into farming.

-Bing Gong

Might peak oil and climate change outlive their usefulness as framings for Transition?

Blog post from  Transition Culture,  19 May 2011:

by Rob Hopkins

TTT’s Frances Northrop proudly displaying its new plaque…

Here’s a kind of half-formed thought that might possibly go somewhere if I start writing about it.  This September sees the fifth anniversary of the Unleashing of Transition Town Totnes.  We were deeply flattered the other day to receive a somewhat premature but very welcome plaque from the Town Council bearing the inscription “Transition Town Totnes: to celebrate their first 5 years of activity within the town”.  I’ll probably write a more detailed ‘Totnes: some reflections after 5 years in Transition’ in September, but this post was prompted by an email from a friend in Totnes, who grew up here in the 1960s and is very much a pillar of the community.  He had valiantly read my dissertation, ‘Localisation and Resilience‘, cover to cover and wrote with some reflections.  In his email he makes a very interesting point:

“Another conclusion occurred. Further mention of climate change, peak oil and sustainability is probably pointless. Again, you are either preaching to the choir or the resistant. By now everybody has heard of those terms and must be intimately familiar with them. I don’t think there is anybody left who can genuinely call themselves undecided”.

I thought this was a fascinating observation.  Although it is peak oil and climate change that initially inspire Transition initiatives and form the underpinning for much of the initial awareness stage, might it be that an initiative reaches a point where continued focus on those issues could be counterproductive?  His point is that most people have by now made up their mind as to whether they agree that peak oil and/or climate change are important issues or not.  Beyond a certain point it could be that continued highlighting of the issues actually risks dividing and alienating people rather than including them?

At the moment, the outward focus of TTT’s work is more explicitly about economic regeneration and social enterprise, rather than on promoting the issues of peak oil and climate change.  We are promoting the concept of ‘localisation as economic development’ and about to start work on an ‘Economic Blueprint’ for the town, working with the Town Council, Chamber of Commerce and other local bodies.  We are seeking to support emerging social enterprises and to create new mechanisms for inward investment.  While all of this, clearly, is underpinned by an understanding of peak oil and climate change, we haven’t actually held a talk about peak or climate change for a while.

In the forthcoming ‘Transition Companion’ (out in September), Transition is described has happening in 5 stages:

1. Getting started:  this is the beginning stage, where a group of people come together and form a group, inspired by the principles of Transition.  They start awareness raising and networking in their community
2. Deepening: here they start to become ‘Transition wherever’, a recognised initiative which begins to embark on distinct projects as well as becoming more organised in how it works
3. Connecting: then they start to go deeper, reaching beyond the ‘usual suspects’ and deeper into the community
4. Building: this is about embarking on the practicalities of intentional localisation, thinking strategically about creating new institutions, new infrastructure and supporting the emergence of new enterprises that ground the concept of ‘localisation as economic development’ in the local economy
5. Daring to Dream: what would it look like if every community had a vibrant Transition initiative and they were all actively transforming their local economies?  Here we step into the speculative and wonder about where all this could go.

In the first stage, peak oil and climate change serve as the absolutely vital framing, the inspiration and the motivator.  In stage two, an ongoing programme keeping them out there as issues is also vital.  By stage three, you are beginning to get into the field of the people who are open to knowing about it will probably already have picked up on it, and the rest of the people might be starting to feel a bit like you are ‘that lot’, like Transition is not for them, and starting to feel excluded from what is supposed to be a community-driven process.

By stage four, ‘Building’, while any strategic thinking, such as an Energy Descent Action Plan, a local economic blueprint or whatever, clearly needs to be underpinned by peak oil and climate change, as well as the end of economic growth, the focus starts to shift to economic regeneration and enterprise.  As the plaque from Totnes Town Council shows, at this point it is possible to be well and widely respected, but this is the stage where people are expecting great things and are expecting you to live up to the expectations you have created.

Shifting the focus to ‘localisation as economic development’ offers the opportunity for those who felt excluded by the peak oil and climate change focus to step in, and for your Transition initiative to be seen as addressing local challenges as perceived by most people (lack of employment, skills and training, lack of affordable housing and so on).  By this stage, awareness of peak oil and climate change are diffused into the DNA of the organisation.  As TTT nears its fifth birthday, this is certainly our experience.  People with great expertise and skills in business and livelihoods are coming on board to help drive forward our work in a range of initiatives and projects who may well not have done so before.

Topsham Ales share holders proudly displaying their share certificates…
Credit: Mark Hodgson

In Topsham in Devon, Transition Town Topsham began in the usual way, showing films, holding events, doing some practical projects.  They found though that engagement was only going so far.  “Is peak oil the thing that will unite and inspire this community?” they asked.  Probably not.  “Climate change?”  Again, probably not.  “Beer?”  Ah now you’re talking.  Topsham Ales was funded by £35,000 raised in shares being sold to 56 members of the co-operative they created.  It is rooted in the concept of localisation (uses local hops, spent hops go to local pigs, beers and labels celebrate local place and history) but not explicitly so.  Might there be a lesson to be learnt from Topsham Ales in terms of the need, at a certain point in the evolution of a Transition initiative, to shift its focus?  Discuss….

(read comments on Transition Culture.org)

Marin Clean Energy and the Transition Movement: Raven Gray with Megan Matson, Bernie Stephan and Bing Gong on the Post Carbon radio show, KWMR, Nov. 22, 2010.

Interview with Raven Gray (audio, 25:54 min)

Raven Gray is the Founder of Transition US, which supports the emergence of the Transition Town Movement across the States, and a founding pioneer of the movement in the UK. An ecological designer, educator, writer, activist and organizer, she is fired to inspire people to restore the vibrancy and resilience back into our lives and communities. She’s worked as an organic dairy farmer, ecovillage teacher, community arts activist, sacred sites steward. She is consciously committed to restoring the earth’s balance, and is a frequent speaker on this topic and the urgent need for transition. Raven has a BA in Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community, and an MSc in Holistic Science. She lives in a permaculture haven with her 2 year old son, tucked into the south facing hills of Lagunitas, surrounded by the beauty and bounty of nature.

Totnes EDAP Launch Part Two: “the single most important book about Totnes ever published,” Rob Hopkins, Transitionculture.org, May 10 2010

Transition in Action, Totnes 2030, an Energy Descent Action Plan

The Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan received a fittingly rousing welcome into the world on Friday night in Totnes Civic Hall, following on from the earlier parade through town and its announcement by the Town Crier.

…we do not look at this as a time for gloom and doom, rather as an opportunity for creativity, optimism, entrepreneurship. Our approach is to look these challenges square in the face. We cannot hide, and these times demand our creativity. Transition is about the application of  “engaged optimism” to figuring out where we go from here. We argue that the end of cheap and easy energy means more than just lightbulb changing and recycling. It means a shift of our focus from globalisation to a world which is “intensely and inherently local.”

But rebuilding an economy that can support us here, vibrant local agriculture, renewable energy systems that we own and benefit from, energy efficient housing that utilises local materials, more local and meaningful employment, these are not the things of some Luddite retreat to the caves, but the foundations of a resilient economy more adapted to the times.

Read the Totnes and District Energy Descent Action Plan online.

Quick Look at some  excerpts from online EDAP

from Part 2: Creating an EDAP

from Part 3: Timeline of Change

from Part 3: Food Security

from Part 3: Energy Security

198: Tools of Connection

C-Realm Podcast

[Interview with Carolyn Baker starts at 6:47]

Navigating the Coming Chaos of Unprecedented Transitions

This is a recorded conversation with a cutting-edge podcaster who calls himself  “KMO” and Carolyn Baker, author of Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse. They discuss ways that people can prepare themselves mentally, emotionally and spiritually to pass through the initiatory experience that the collapse of industrial civilization may present to us as individuals and to our communities.

Submitted by Bing Gong

EON’s James Heddle interviews Richard Heinberg on the aftermath of the Copenhagen negotiations:
Beyond Copenhagen- Now What?

As headlines proclaim that COP15 was a ‘catastrophe,’  that a global climate deal is ‘all but impossible in 2010,’ and that progressive NGOs,’ “the forces trying to tackle climate change, are in disarray, wandering in small groups around the battlefield like a beaten army,” according to one diplomat, Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute (postcarbon.org), talks about the factors contributing to the stalemate in the Copenhagen climate summit, the other ‘game ending’ challenges confronting the current economic system, and the bottom-up steps necessary to move to a post-carbon economy.  Interviewed by EON’s James Heddle.