About

About Transition West Marin

Welcome to Transition West Marin, a network of individuals and organizations working towards building local resilience and reducing carbon emissions.

We are working to make our community self-sufficient. After many meetings and creating working groups, our members have gone off and become involved in the community with their projects. So involved that we don’t hold official meetings any more.

But we still would like to hear from you. If you have thoughts about Transition, please send it to: transitionwm at gmail dot com

We look forward to hearing your thoughts about how the transition process in our community should proceed.

Best wishes,

Transition West Marin,
a network of individuals and organizations in West Marin working towards building local resilience and reducing carbon emissions.

PS- Three years of web posts became unwieldy and, as of 2012, they have been edited to reflect TWM’s current activity, maintaining pages which offer useful resources and focusing only on Transition topics. Posts of a political nature have been removed and reposted at an independent blog, Now Is The Time. Webmaster: Jan R. Markle.

What is a Transition Town?

According to Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, it is a community that has begun to think about this 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)?”

Since 2005, when the first Transition Town, Totnes, UK, was begun, Transition Towns has become a worldwide movement, having currently produced over 183 official Transition Towns in 15 countries, all springing from a “…few motivated individuals who began to think about the challenges and opportunities of peak oil and climate change.”

If you want to learn more about the Transition Movement there are many websites you can visit.
1. Rob Hopkins’ blog is Transition Culture.org.
2. Transition US, located in Sebastopol, CA is the group formed to network and inspire Transition groups forming in the US. Sign up and get their newsletter.
3. Transition Facebook group has over 2000 members. The group is listed as global.

And, if you haven’t seen the NY Times Magazine article, from 19 April 2009, that told the story of one of the first transition towns, “The End is Near (Yay!)”, here it is. It follows the progression of Sand Point, Idaho becoming a transition town. For more, see Resources page.

In this recent TED Talk (video), Rob Hopkins gives a good overview of his approach as he speaks about the current challenge of diminishing oil and his Transition and resilience responses, July 22, 2009 (18 min).

Read his feelings about giving the talk at his blog, transitionculture.org.

Transition West Marin brochure

Welcome Transition West Marin, by Jan R. Markle, published in the West Marin Citizen, Mar. 5, 2009

transition training Feb28 2009

“Transition West Marin is the 28^th official Transition Initiative in the US, the 171st official Transition Initiative in the world. Not actually a town, ‘West Marin’ is an unincorporated, mainly rural area of western Marin County, California. Home to about 10,000 people, it encompasses 14 small villages, and stretches 40 miles from Muir Beach in the South, through the San Geronimo Valley and Point Reyes Station, to Tomales in the North…” Read more.

History of Transition West Marin

Transition West Marin is a network of individuals and organizations in West Marin, California, committed to building local resiliency and reducing carbon emissions to cope with peak oil, climate change and economic instability.

Previously known as West Marin Localization Network, and before that, Marin Alliance, the historical context for Transition West Marin is found here in these “West Marin Visions,” community meetings discussing visions for the future, held in early 2008.

1. West Marin Visions: A Community Conversation, A Peak into the Future, Feb. 28, 2008: photos and summaries of West Marin’s vision for 2033.
2. West Marin Visions, part 2: The Conversation Continues, April 7, 2008: photos and summaries of West Marin’s vision continued.

Sponsors of Transition West Marin