- the first 'get together' on Friday 29th May at MacNamara's pub, Scariff, featured a screening of the inspirational film 'The Power of Community' about how the people of Cuba coped with an energy and economic crisis. There was a short talk about how transition initiatives can work, a talk about the new East Clare LETS scheme (a kind of barter system), followed by an interesting discussion focussing on energy-saving, community gardens, community-supported farming, allotments, etc. Gathering in October was at Seedsavers with over 30 people, much discussion of ideas, music, pizza. More events will follow !
THE POWER OF COMMUNITY
IN THE FACE OF ECONOMICAL, ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL CHANGES, COMMUNITIES CAN RISE AND JOIN FORCES TO BRING ABOUT POSITIVE SOLUTIONS.
‘Transition Communities’ initiatives around the world are about bringing people together to share skills and expertise in order to create resilience in the local community and strengthen the local economy. Many communities around Ireland and worldwide have begun this inspiring and empowering journey, we warmly invite you to join us too !
Transition East Clare initiative
MORE INFO PLEASE CONTACT TATIANA - 061 924878
OR BOB WILSON - 061-640765 - EMAIL : info@celtnet.org
More about us and others on
TRANSITION INITIATIVES PRIMER
Introduction
In response to the twin pressures of Peak Oil and Climate Change, some pioneering communities in the UK, Ireland and beyond are taking an integrated and inclusive approach to reduce their carbon footprint and increase their ability to withstand the fundamental shift that will accompany Peak Oil.
This document provides an overview of these initiatives for transitioning to a lower energy future and to greater levels of community resilience.
This document comes to you from the Transition Network, a charity recently formed to build upon the groundbreaking work done by Kinsale, Totnes and the other early adopters of the Transition model.
Our mission is to inspire, inform, support, network 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 has given us a firm foundation for our work.
Why Transition initiatives are necessary
The two toughest challenges facing humankind at the start of this 21st century are Climate Change and Peak Oil. The former is well documented and very visible in the media. Peak Oil, however, remains under the radar for most people. Yet Peak Oil, heralding the era of ever-declining fossil fuel availability, may well challenge the economic and social stability that is essential if we are to mitigate the threats posed by Climate Change.
The transition initiatives currently in progress in the UK and beyond represent the most promising way of engaging people and communities to take the far-reaching actions that are required to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Furthermore, these relocalisation efforts are designed to result in a life that is more fulfilling, more socially connected and more equitable.
More about Peak Oil
You may not have encountered the principles of Peak Oil in the media. Don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. There was a time when Climate Change suffered the same lack of exposure.
Peak Oil is not about “running out of oil” – we'll never run out of oil. There will always be oil left in the ground because either it's too hard to reach or it takes too much energy to extract. Ponder on a fact that the economists conveniently gloss over – regardless of how much money you can make selling oil, once it takes an oil barrel's worth of energy to extract a barrel of oil, the exploration, the drilling and the pumping will grind to a halt.
Peak Oil is about the end of cheap and plentiful oil, the recognition that the ever increasing volumes of oil being pumped into our economies will peak and then inexorably decline. It’s about understanding how our industrial way of life is absolutely dependent on this ever-increasing supply of cheap oil.
From the start of the 1900s, plentiful oil allowed a coal-based industrialised society to massively accelerate its “development”. From that time, each year there has been more oil (apart from the two oil shocks in the 1970s when Middle East crises caused worldwide recessions). And each year, society increased its complexity, its mechanisation, its globalised connectedness and its energy consumption levels.
The problems start when we’ve extracted around half of the recoverable oil. At this point, the oil gets more expensive (in cash and energy terms) to extract, is slower flowing and of a lower quality. At this point, for the first time in history, we aren’t able to increase the amount of oil that’s coming out of the ground, being refined and reaching the market.
At this point, oil supply plateaus and then declines, with massive ramifications for industrialised societies. Very few people are paying attention to this phenomenon, and it’s easy to understand why.
The misleading petrol tank analogy
Most of us have experienced running out of petrol at some time while driving, and this can subtly misinform our expectations around oil depletion.
The pattern is simple. Your car runs smoothly as you use up the petrol, right until the last fraction of a litre – when it’s about 97% empty. That’s the only time you start to feel the impact of your “petrol depletion”. The car starts juddering and spluttering, letting you know that you’d better act fast otherwise it’ll come to a sudden standstill. This pattern means we can ignore the petrol gauge until very late in the depletion cycle.
However, the way oil depletion affects industrial society couldn’t be more different. The key point isn’t when you’re close to running out of oil. It’s when the “tank” is half full (or half empty). Here’s why…
Back to Peak Oil
Peak Oil recognises that we are not close to running out of oil. However, we are close to running out of easy-to-get, cheap oil. Very close. That means we’re about to go into energy decline – that extended period when, year on year, we have decreasing amounts of oil to fuel our industrialised way of life.
The key concepts and implications of this are as follows:
• of all the fossil fuels, oil is uniquely energy dense and easy to transport.
• ever-increasing amounts of oil have fuelled the growth of industrial economies.
• all the key elements of industrial societies - transportation, manufacturing, food production, home heating, construction - are totally reliant on oil.
• understanding the depletion pattern of oil fields is crucial. There is a consistent pattern to the rate of extraction of oil - and this applies to individual fields, to an oil region, to a country and indeed to the entire planet - namely, the first half of the oil is easy to extract and high quality. However, once about half the recoverable oil has been pumped out, further extraction starts getting more expensive, slower, more energy intensive and the oil is of a lower quality.
• this pattern means that the flow of oil to the market, which has been steadily increasing over the past 150 years, will peak. After that, every successive year will see an ever-diminishing flow of oil, as well as an increasing risk of interruptions to supply.
• a growing body of independent oil experts and oil geologists have calculated that the peak will occur between 2006 and 2012 (a few years of hindsight is required in order to confirm the peaking point).
• technological advances in oil extraction and prospecting will have only a minor effect on depletion rates. As an example, when the US (lower 48) hit their oil production peak in 1972, the rate of depletion over the next decades was high, despite a significant wave of technological innovations.
It’s difficult to overstate what this means to our lives in the developed countries.
To understand the degree to which this will affect the industrial world, here is the opening paragraph of executive summary of a report prepared for the US government in 2005 by an agency of experts in risk management and oil analysis:
"The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking." Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management. Robert L. Hirsch, SAIC
This report only came to light after being buried by the US administration for close to a year. A perusal of the far-reaching implications of the report give a clear indication why the government was so keen to keep it out of the public domain.
Despite the denial by governments, their agencies and oil companies that there is a problem, both Chevron and Total have both admitted that we're at the end of the era of cheap oil.
Jeremy Gilbert, former Chief Petroleum Engineer at BP, in May 2007 said the following:
“I expect to see a peak sometime before 2015… and decline rates at 4-8% per year“ (May-2007)
Several US senators, principally Republican Roscoe Bartlett, are raising the issue in the upper house.
In New Zealand, Jeanette Fitzsimmons, co-leader of the Green Party, is raising awareness about the threats of Peak Oil. In 2006, Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand said this:
“…oil price is very high because probably we're not too far short from peak production if we're not already there.“
In Australia, the MP Andrew McNamara heading up the Queensland Oil Vulnerability Task force. He is now Queensland's newly appointed Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change Ahead of the impending public release of his government-commissioned report on "Queensland's Vulnerability to Oil Prices", he talks about the importance of relocalisation in the face of oil depletion:
"There's no question whatsoever that community driven local solutions will be essential. That's where government will certainly have a role to play in assisting and encouraging local networks, who can assist with local supplies of food and fuel and water and jobs and the things we need from shops. It was one of my contentions in the first speech I made on this issue in February of 2005... that we will see a relocalisation of the way in which we live that will remind us of not last century, but the one before that. And that's not a bad thing. Undoubtedly one of the cheaper responses that will be very effective is promoting local consumption, local production, local distribution. And there are positive spin offs to that in terms of getting to know our communities better. There are human and community benefits from local networks that I look forward to seeing grow." The Honourable Andrew McNamara, Queensland Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation
But apart from a few notable exceptions, national leaders are not stepping up to address these problems in any meaningful way. Yet.
So if the political leaders aren’t going to fix the problem, what is?
Technology is often touted as the panacea for Peak Oil and Climate Change problems. However, a careful review of the reality of these technological solutions indicates their immaturity, their often disastrous environmental consequences and their lack of connection to the real world.
We could dither about, waiting for technology or governments to solve the problem for us. However, general consensus now appears to be that this is a rather high risk option.
It’s up to us in our local communities to step up into a leadership position on this.
We have to get busy NOW to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil. The good news is that many of the solutions and mitigations for Climate Change will also address the threats from Peak Oil - and vice versa.
Taking action: the big picture - initiatives at global, national and local levels
Transition Initiatives exemplify the principle of thinking globally, acting locally.
However, it's easy to wonder just how much difference you might make in your own community when the problems are so gigantic.
Well, first of all, even before you count the difference you're making in your community, remember that whenever you do this kind of work, you're inspiring other people. And then they take up the challenge and inspire others, And so it goes on. This way, your small contribution can multiply many many times over and be truly significant.
It's also good to know that there are schemes in place that are addressing the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change at the global and national levels. Transition Initiatives complement these schemes by making sure that the changes they demand in the way we live our day-to-day lives can actually be put into practice at ground level.
Here are the principle ones:
Global
• the Oil Depletion Protocol provides a way for nations to cooperatively manage their descent to lower oil use levels. This protocol provides a model for both oil producing and oil consuming countries to systematically reduce global oil consumption. For further information, go to www.oildepletionprotocol.org.
• Contraction & Convergence offers a mechanism for reducing global carbon emissions and establishing much greater levels of equity in peoples’ and nations’ right to emit carbon. An excellent resource for this scheme is http://www.climatejustice.org.uk/about/
National: energy rationing systems appear to hold the greatest promise for reducing our fossil fuel consumption at the national level. The government is already tentatively talking about this highly practical solution. See www.teqs.net for the full story.
Local: this is where local Transition Initiatives play a significant role. In essence, this is a process of relocalising all essential elements that a community needs to sustain itself and thrive. It builds local resilience in the face of the potentially damaging effects of Peak Oil while dramatically reducing the community's carbon footprint. In this way, it addresses both Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Several cities in the US and well over 100 communities around the world are setting off on their own relocalisation journeys. For example, at the city level, Portland in Oregon (population 550,000) has just published their Peak Oil initial report for public consultation. Their opening paragraph explains their concerns:
"In the past few years, powerful evidence has emerged that casts doubt on that assumption [that oil and natural gas will remain plentiful and affordable] and suggests that global production of both oil and natural gas is likely to reach its historic peak soon. This phenomenon is referred to as “Peak Oil.” Given both the continuous rise in global demand for these products and the fundamental role they play in all levels of social, economic and geopolitical activities, the consequences of such an event are enormous."
Portland has actually incorporated the Oil Depletion Protocol in its targets - it aims to reduce its oil and gas consumption by 2.6% per year, reaching a 25% reduction by 2020.
Here in the UK, a growing number of communities are looking towards the energy descent planning work that began in Kinsale in Ireland and is continuing in Totnes in Devon.
There are many excellent examples of energy reduction programmes in place in the UK under the "sustainability" banner. However, it's only when sustainability principles are combined with an understanding of Climate Change and Peak Oil that a fully integrated approach to the solutions can follow.
The Transition Model – what exactly is it?
The Transition Model is a loose set of realworld principles and practices that have been built up over time though experimentation and observation of communities as they drive forward to build local resilience and reduce carbon emissions.
There's more detail on each of these points elsewhere in the Primer, but for the moment, it might help to have the various elements outlined here.
Underlying awareness
Underpinning the Transition Model is a recognition of the following:
• Climate Change and Peak Oil require urgent action
• life with less energy is inevitable and it is better to plan for it than be taken by surprise
• industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with energy shocks
• we have to act together and we have to act now
• regarding the world economy and the consumptive patterns within it, as long as the laws of physics apply, infinite growth within a finite system (such as planet earth) simply isn't possible.
• we demonstrated phenomenal levels of ingenuity and intelligence as we raced up the energy curve over the last 150 years, and there's no reason why we can't use those qualities, and more, as we negotiate our way down from the peak of the energy mountain
• if we plan and act early enough, and use our creativity and cooperation to unleash the genius within our local communities, then we can build a future that could be far more fulfilling and enriching, more connected and more gentle on the earth than the lifestyles we have today.
The 7 "Buts"
When faced with the prospect of difficult change and challenging actions, humans will construct their own emotional and psychological barriers that stop them taking those actions. The "7 Buts" name and dismantle what we've seen to be the most typical barriers to change.
The 12 Steps to Transition
These are the areas that we've observed as being critical so far in Transition Initiatives. Communities are adopting these steps, adapting and reordering as they see fit.
It's not a prescriptive "must-do" list, it's what we've seen working through close scrutiny and being in Transition Initiatives ourselves. In time it will certainly change as we learn more about how communities can most effectively tackle the challenges of climate change and peak oil.
Transition Network
The Transition Network's role is to accelerate change through inspiring, encouraging, supporting, networking and training communities as they consider and then implement their version of the model.
Kinsale 2021 – an Energy Descent Action Plan
The first draft of the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) was completed in 2005. It sets out how Kinsale, an Irish town in West Cork of about 7,000 people, could make the transition from a high energy consumption town to a low energy one in response to the challenge of the impending peaking of world oil production.
This report, prepared by permaculture students from Kinsale Further Education College under the tutelage of Rob Hopkins, looks at how Kinsale could navigate this uncertain time by setting out a clear vision of a lower energy future, and then identifying a clear timetable for achieving it.
These efforts were one of the first attempts at this kind of project anywhere in the world. The report looks at most aspects of life in Kinsale, including food, energy, tourism, education and health. The report was also structured in such a way to enable other communities and towns to adopt a similar process and transition themselves towards a lower energy future.
The EDAP was awarded the Cork Environmental Forum’s prestigious 2005 Roll of Honour Award and, even more importantly, was formally adopted in a unanimous vote by Kinsale's town council at the end of 2005.
It’s worth remembering that this was a student project, working with a completely new approach. There’s much work to be done to turn it into a lasting project with deep roots within the community, but it’s a great start.
The lessons learned at Kinsale have resulted in the 12 steps, featuring later in this document.
The document can be downloaded here: http://transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/members/KinsaleEnergyDescentActionPlan.pdf.
Transition Town Totnes
Transition Town Totnes was initiated by Rob Hopkins to address the twin challenge of Peak Oil and Climate Change. The initiative builds on Rob's seminal work in Ireland to develop an Energy Descent Action plan for the town of Kinsale.
Transition Town Totnes (TTT) is the UK's first "Transition Town" and draws on the collective genius of the local community to build resilience through a process of relocalising, where feasible, all aspects of life.
The thinking behind TTT is simply that a town using much less energy and resources than currently consumed could, if properly planned for and designed, be more resilient, more abundant and more pleasurable that the present.
Given the likely disruptions ahead resulting from Peak Oil and Climate Change, a resilient community - a community that is self-reliant for the greatest possible number of its needs - will be infinitely better prepared than existing communities with their total dependence on heavily globalised systems for food, energy, transportation, health and housing.
Through 2007, the project will continue to develop an Energy Descent Action Plan for Totnes, designing a positive timetabled way down from the oil peak. TTT strives to be inclusive, imaginative, practical and fun.
The TTT project started in late 2005 with an intensive programme of awareness raising on the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change. When the population had been sufficiently primed, the project was kicked off with a "Official Unleashing of Transition Town Totnes" in September 2006, attended by 350 in the Town Hall. Since then, in an ever-expanding range of presentations, training courses, meetings, seminars, interviews, documents, blogs and downright hard work, the initiative has captured the imagination of the town and is progressing well.
Here's a rundown of the events, screenings, workshops etc so far (as at Jun-07):
• film screenings: 8 (with audiences up to 150)
• keynote presentations: 7 (with audiences up to 350) including such experts as:
o Richard Heinberg (www.richardheinberg.com)
o Aubrey Meyer (Contraction & Convergence - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_and_Convergence)
o David Fleming (www.teqs.net)
o Mayer Hillman (Climate Change author and activist)
o “Food and Farming in Transition”, a sell-out evening at Dartington Hall, featuring Chris Skrebowski, Jeremy Leggett, Patrick Holden and Vandana Shiva
• events: 7 (with audiences up to 400), including:
o the "Great Unleashing of Transition Town Totnes"
o open space meetings for Food, Energy, Heart & Soul and Housing
o "Seedy Sunday" seed sharing event
o Local council “open space” meeting at Schumacher college
o “Estates in Transition”, a day long seminar for local landowners to evaluate their opportunities in a more localised scenario
• training courses: 10-week "Skilling Up for Powerdown" evening classes
• workshops: Oil Vulnerability Auditing (with 3 local businesses signed up to receive this service)
• resources: Local food directory
• Solar Hot Water challenge: getting 50 people to sign up for the programme
• pilot projects: Local currency (Totnes pounds, accepted by 20 local businesses) ), now being launched as a larger scheme following the successful pilot, with a printing of 10,000 notes and with over 65 businesses taking part
• Oral history archives: gathering data from people who lived when everyone had a lower energy lifestyle
• Nut Tree Capital of Britain: first plantings have started
• Transition Stories: working with local schoolkids to get them thinking about a lower energy lifestyle
• Garden Swap: connecting people who are too old to work their gardens to people who don't have a garden but want to work in one
The programme of activities and events continues at a similar pace into Summer 2007.
In addition to the above activities, ten working groups are meeting regularly to investigate lower energy and more resilient solutions for these areas: Energy, Healthcare, Food, The Arts, Heart and Soul - the psychology of change, Local Government, Economics and Livelihoods. Further groups are in the process of starting up to round out this holistic approach to building the community resilience plan for Totnes.
The up-to-date situation can be viewed at either www.transitionculture.org (Rob Hopkins' personal blog) or www.transitiontowns.org/Totnes.
As be build a critical mass of communities embarking on these energy descent planning processes, we’ll be able to build a thriving cooperative network where people are sharing best practice, helping each other and creating a way of life that is far better than the atomised, disconnected unsustainable and inequitable society that we’ve grown into, largely on the back of super-abundant cheap oil.
Setting up your Transition Initiative – criteria
We’ve established a draft set of criteria that tells us how ready a community is to embark on this journey to a lower energy future. If you’re thinking of adopting the Transition model for your community, take a look at this list and make an honest appraisal of where you are on these points. If there are any gaps, it should give you something to focus on while you build the initial energy and contacts around this initiative.
We've introduced this slightly more formal approach to registering Transition Towns/villages for several key reasons:
• Our trustees and funders want to make sure that while we actively nurture embryonic projects, we only promote to "official" status those communities we feel are ready to move into the awareness raising stage. This status confers additional levels of support such as speakers, trainings, wiki and forums that we're currently rolling out
• In order to establish coordinated programmes (such as combined funding bids to the National Lottery) we need a formally established category of Transition Initiatives that we're fully confident can support and deliver against such programmes.
• We've seen at least one community stall because they didn't have the right mindset or a suitable group of people, and didn't really understand what they were letting themselves in for.
• The distinct roles of "Local Transition Initiative", "Local Transition Hub" and "Temporary Initiating Hub" are very different and need to be discussed at the outset (see below).
Criteria
These criteria are developing all the time, and certainly aren’t written in stone.
1. an understanding of Peak Oil and Climate Change as twin drivers (to be written into your group's constitution or governing documents)
2. a group of 4-5 people willing to step into leadership roles (not just the boundless enthusiasm of a single person)
3. at least two people from the core team willing to attend an initial two day training course. Initially these will be in Totnes and over time we'll roll them out to other areas as well, including internationally. Transition Training is just UK based right now, but that's going to have to change – we're working on it.
4. a potentially strong connection to the local council
5. an initial understanding of the 12 steps (see below)
6. a commitment to ask for help when needed
7. a commitment to regularly update your Transition Initiative web presence - either the wiki (collaborative workspace on the web that we'll make available to you), or your own website
8. a commitment to write up something on the Transition Towns blog once every couple of months (the world will be watching...)
9. a commitment, once you're into the Transition, for your group to give at least two presentations to other communities (in the vicinity) that are considering embarking on this journey – a sort of “here’s what we did” or "here's how it was for us" talk
10. a commitment to network with other communities in Transition
11. minimal conflicts of interests in the core team
12. a commitment to work with the Transition Network re grant applications for funding from national grant giving bodies. Your own local trusts are yours to deal with as appropriate.
13. a commitment to strive for inclusivity across your entire initiative. We're aware that we need to strengthen this point in response to concerns about extreme political groups becoming involved in transition initiatives. One way of doing this is for your core group to explicitly state their support the UN Declaration of Human Rights (General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948). You could add this to your constitution (when finalised) so that extreme political groups that have discrimination as a key value cannot participate in the decision-making bodies within your transition initiative. There may be more elegant ways of handling this requirement, and there's a group within the network looking at how that might be done.
14. a recognition that although your entire county or district may need to go through transition, the first place for you to start is in your local community. It may be that eventually the number of transitioning communities in your area warrant some central group to help provide local support, but this will emerge over time, rather than be imposed. This point is in response to the several instances of people rushing off to transition their entire county/region rather than their local community. In exceptional situations where a coordinating hub or initiating hub needs to be set up (currently Bristol, Forest of Dean, Brighton&Hove) that hub is responsible for making sure these criteria are applied to all the initiatives that start within their area. Further responsibilities for ongoing support and possibly training are emerging as we see this role develop.
Further criteria apply to initiating/coordinating hubs – these can be discussed person to person.
15. and finally, we recommend that at least one person on the core team should have attended a permaculture design course... it really does seem to make a difference
Once you can demonstrate to us at Transition Network that you're on board with these and ready to set off on your transition journey, you open the door to all sorts of wonderful support, guidance, materials, webspace, training, networking opportunities and coordinated funding initiatives that we'll be rolling out during 2007 and beyond.
The door is ready to open... contact details are at the end of this document.
Setting up your Transition Initiative – different types
There now appear to be four types of initiatives emerging within the Transition Model:
1. the "Local Transition Initiative" - embedded in its own locale where the steering group inspires and organises the local community. This is the real heart of "Transition".
2. the "Local Transition Hub" - based within a large congruent/contiguous area with its own identity (eg a city). Helps establish and support "local transition initiatives".
3. the "Temporary Initiating Hub" - made up of a collection of acquainted individuals work with eachother to help set up "local transition initiatives" in their home communities. As the initiatives arise, the hub gradually disbands.
4. the "Regional Coordinating Hub" – less of an organisation, more of a collection of existing transition initiatives that get together for mutual support and coordination around activities such as sharing resources and representing a united front to various government bodies.
More about the "Local Transition Initiative"
This is the most frequent and simple initiative, typically with communities of up to 15,000 people. Examples of this include Totnes, Lewes, Wrington, Portobello in Edinburgh.
This is where real change happens - at the local level, driven by the people living there. Without active local initiatives, there is no Transition Network.
More about the "Local Transition Hub"
Once it is fully established (and hopefully funded), this group's role will be to fire up transition initiatives in its designated “Locale” (ie surrounding area) and maintain a role of inspiring, encouraging, registering, supporting, networking and possibly training those initiatives. The process of building that role will take time, and newly formed groups (and those operating without funding) can’t be expected to perform all those tasks right from the start.
We envisage that the relationship between the Hub and the initiatives in the Locale will be mutually supportive and, at least initially, informal. We’re hoping that within the Locale, the various initiatives will also network vigorously together and become mutually supportive, recognising that a community is only as resilient as its neighbours.
As we’re in the very early days of this massive transition experiment, these roles and models are likely to evolve as experience shows us what works and what doesn’t.
Current examples of Local Transition Hubs include Tynedale and Forest of Dean.
The Local Transition Hub is also responsible for carrying out the "transition network" role in the Locale of making sure that each initiative works on the baseline Transition criteria right from the outset. As individual initiatives within the Locale mature, the Hub will encourage them to apply to the Transition Network for consideration as an official transition initiative. Over time, we expect the task of “registering” communities to official status will be taken up by the Local Transition Hub.
The Local Transition Hub will be a focus for communications with the local initiatives in that area.
If a group wants to take the role of a Local Transition Hub, then we at the Transition Network need to be really confident that you know what you're letting yourself in for and that you're going to be able to handle it. This'll probably involve a number of conversations, and probably a face to face discussion with the team.
We're planning to set up a "Local Transition Hub" community to discuss the complexities of this approach - and there are many.
We think this Local Transition Hub model is crucial for the cities, and larger scale rural initiatives, but the early adopters are going to have to carefully feel their way into this role. It's virgin territory and by no means a trivial undertaking... proceed with caution.
More about the "Temporary Initiating Hub"
This type of group is made up of a collection of individuals/groups from separate locales in the same region who are accustomed to working with each other in some kind of activist/environmental capacity.
The group helps each other to fire up Local Transition Initiatives in the region and then dissolves, with the original members moving into their own Local Transition Initiatives once they've achieved some critical mass to form a local steering group.
The role of the Temporary Initiating Hub is simply to handle the inspirational work with no ongoing responsibilities as a hub.
West Berkshire and a couple of others are taking this approach. In this scenario, the local initiatives, once they've started up, will look to the Transition Network for support training etc.
More about the role of the "Regional Transition Hub"
It's clear that we'll need to have some sort of structure that is able to engage with government at all levels – local, regional and national.
This recognition has partly driven the formation of several groups that intended to represent existing and future transition initiatives in their "catchment area".
Through observing this phenomenon and seeing what works well and what doesn't, and after discussing the situation with various transition initiatives, Transition Network is introducing a very brief set of criteria for this type of group.
"Transition Network will only recognise organisations representing collections of transition initiatives if:
o they have been requested by or emerged/arisen from a significant proportion of active Transition Initiatives (both official and embryonic) within that "catchment area", and
o they are organised/run/coordinated by representatives appointed from within active Transition Initiatives (both official and embryonic) from within that "catchment area".
Other criteria regarding purpose and scope of activities will emerge as these coordinating hubs form."
These criteria would, we feel, produce a demonstrably authentic, mandated, accountable, transparent, knowledgeable and suitably motivated supra-group.
Conclusion
As ever, we're dealing with a moving feast, and no doubt we'll need to keep a close eye on the field and respond in ways that helps the core groups – the local transition initiatives – achieve their key objectives.
The 12 steps of Transition
These 12 Steps have grown out of the observation of what seemed to work in the early Transition Initiatives, in particular Totnes.
They are not meant to be in any way prescriptive. Each project assembles these in different ways, adds new ones, disregards others. They do, however, offer what we think to be the key elements of your journey, and will hopefully help you over the first couple of years of your work.
#1. Set up a steering group and design its demise from the outset
This stage puts a core team in place to drive the project forward during the initial phases.
We recommend that you form your Steering Group with the aim of getting through stages 2 – 5, and agree that once a minimum of four sub-groups (see #5) are formed, the Steering Group disbands and reforms with a person from each of those groups. This requires a degree of humility, but is very important in order to put the success of the project above the individuals involved. Ultimately your Steering Group should become made up of 1 representative from each sub-group.
#2. Awareness raising
This stage will identify your key allies, build crucial networks and prepare the community in general for the launch of your Transition initiative.
For an effective Energy Descent Action plan to evolve, its participants have to understand the potential effects of both Peak Oil and Climate Change – the former demanding a drive to increase community resilience, the later a reduction in carbon footprint.
Screenings of key movies (Inconvenient Truth, End of Suburbia, Crude Awakening, Power of Community) along with panels of “experts” to answer questions at the end of each, are very effective. (See next section for the lowdown on all the movies – where to get them, trailers, what the licensing regulations are, doomster rating vs solution rating)
Talks by experts in their field of Climate Change, Peak Oil and community solutions can be very inspiring.
Articles in local papers, interviews on local radio, presentations to existing groups, including schools, are also part of the toolkit to get people aware of the issues and ready to start thinking of solutions.
#3. Lay the foundations
This stage is about networking with existing groups and activists, making clear to them that the Transition Initiative is designed to incorporate their previous efforts and future inputs by looking at the future in a new way. Acknowledge and honour the work they do, and stress that they have a vital role to play.
Give them a concise and accessible overview of Peak Oil, what it means, how it relates to Climate Change, how it might affect the community in question, and the key challenges it presents. Set out your thinking about how a Transition Initiative might be able to act as a catalyst for getting the community to explore solutions and to begin thinking about grassroots mitigation strategies.
#4. Organise a Great Unleashing
This stage creates a memorable milestone to mark the project’s “coming of age”, moves it right into the community at large, builds a momentum to propel your initiative forward for the next period of its work and celebrates your community’s desire to take action.
In terms of timing, we estimate that 6 months to a year after your first “awareness raising” movie screening is about right.
The Official Unleashing of Transition Town Totnes was held in September 2006, preceded by about 10 months of talks, film screenings and events.
Regarding contents, your Unleashing will need to bring people up to speed on Peak Oil and Climate Change, but in a spirit of “we can do something about this” rather than doom and gloom.
One item of content that we’ve seen work very well is a presentation on the practical and psychological barriers to personal change – after all, this is all about what we do as individuals.
It needn’t be just talks, it could include music, food, opera, break dancing, whatever you feel best reflects your community’s intention to embark on this collective adventure.
#5. Form working groups
Part of the process of developing an Energy Descent Action Plan is tapping into the collective genius of the community. Crucial for this is to set up a number of smaller groups to focus on specific aspects of the process. Each of these groups will develop their own ways of working and their own activities, but will all fall under the umbrella of the project as a whole.
Ideally, working groups are needed for all aspects of life that are required by your community to sustain itself and thrive. Examples of these are: food, waste, energy, education, youth, economics, transport, water, local government.
Each of these working groups is looking at their area and trying to determine the best ways of building community resilience and reducing the carbon footprint. Their solutions will form the backbone of the Energy Descent Action Plan.
#6. Use Open Space
We’ve found Open Space Technology to be a highly effective approach to running meetings for Transition Initiatives.
In theory it ought not to work. A large group of people comes together to explore a particular topic or issue, with no agenda, no timetable, no obvious coordinator and no minute takers.
However, we have run separate Open Spaces for Food, Energy, Housing, Economics and the Psychology of Change. By the end of each meeting, everyone has said what they needed to, extensive notes had been taken and typed up, lots of networking has had taken place, and a huge number of ideas had been identified and visions set out.
The essential reading on Open Space is Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, and you will also find Peggy Holman and Tom Devane’s The Change Handbook: Group Methods for Shaping the Future an invaluable reference on the wider range of such tools.
#7. Develop visible practical manifestations of the project
It is essential that you avoid any sense that your project is just a talking shop where people sit around and draw up wish lists. Your project needs, from an early stage, to begin to create practical, high visibility manifestations in your community. These will significantly enhance people’s perceptions of the project and also their willingness to participate.
There’s a difficult balance to achieve here during these early stages. You need to demonstrate visible progress, without embarking on projects that will ultimately have no place on the Energy Descent Action Plan.
In Transition Town Totnes, the Food group launched a project called ‘Totnes - the Nut Tree Capital of Britain’ which aims to get as much infrastructure of edible nut bearing trees into the town as possible. With the help of the Mayor, we recently planted some trees in the centre of town, and made it a high profile event (see left).
#8. Facilitate the Great Reskilling
If we are to respond to Peak Oil and Climate Change by moving to a lower energy future and relocalising our communities, then we’ll need many of the skills that our grandparents took for granted. One of the most useful things a Transition Initiative can do is to reverse the “great deskilling” of the last 40 years by offering training in a range of some of these skills.
Research among the older members of our communities is instructive – after all, they lived before the throwaway society took hold and they understand what a lower energy society might look like. Some examples of courses are:
repairing, cooking, cycle maintenance, natural building, loft insulation, dyeing, herbal walks, gardening, basic home energy efficiency, making sour doughs, practical food growing (the list is endless).
Your Great Reskilling programme will give people a powerful realisation of their own ability to solve problems, to achieve practical results and to work cooperatively alongside other people. They’ll also appreciate that learning can truly be fun.
#9. Build a Bridge to Local Government
Whatever the degree of groundswell your Transition Initiative manages to generate, however many practical projects you’ve initiated and however wonderful your Energy Descent Plan is, you will not progress too far unless you have cultivated a positive and productive relationship with your local authority. Whether it is planning issues, funding or providing connections, you need them on board. Contrary to your expectations, you may well find that you are pushing against an open door.
We are exploring how we might draft up an Energy Descent Action Plan for Totnes in a format similar to the current Community Development Plan. Perhaps, one day, council planners will be sitting at a table with two documents in front of them – a conventional Community Plan and a beautifully presented Energy Descent Action Plan. It’s sometime in 2008 on the day when oil prices first break the $100 a barrel ceiling. The planners look from one document to the other and conclude that only the Energy Descent Action Plan actually addresses the challenges facing them. And as that document moves centre stage, the community plan slides gently into the bin (we can dream!).
#10. Honour the elders
For those of us born in the 1960s when the cheap oil party was in full swing, it is very hard to picture a life with less oil. Every year of my life (the oil crises of the 70s excepted) has been underpinned by more energy than the previous years.
In order to rebuild that picture of a lower energy society, we have to engage with those who directly remember the transition to the age of Cheap Oil, especially the period between 1930 and 1960.
While you clearly want to avoid any sense that what you are advocating is ‘going back’ or ‘returning’ to some dim distant past, there is much to be learnt from how things were done, what the invisible connections between the different elements of society were and how daily life was supported. Finding out all of this can be deeply illuminating, and can lead to our feeling much more connected to the place we are developing our Transition Initiatives.
#11. Let it go where it wants to go…
Although you may start out developing your Transition Initiative with a clear idea of where it will go, it will inevitably go elsewhere. If you try and hold onto a rigid vision, it will begin to sap your energy and appear to stall. Your role is not to come up with all the answers, but to act as a catalyst for the community to design their own transition.
If you keep your focus on the key design criteria – building community resilience and reducing the carbon footprint – you’ll watch as the collective genius of the community enables a feasible, practicable and highly inventive solution to emerge.
#12. Create an Energy Descent Plan
Each working group will have been focusing on practical actions to increase community resilience and reduce the carbon footprint.
Combined, these actions form the Energy Descent Action Plan. That’s where the collective genius of the community has designed its own future to take account of the potential threats from Peak Oil and Climate Change.
The process of building the EDAP is not a trivial task. It's evolving as we figure out what works and what doesn't.
Transition Network Support – Local Resource Picture template
Building a picture of the local resource – current and potential availability, current and potential requirements – will be key to creating a realistic EDAP. We're developing templates to help this process.
Transition Network Support – Transition Timeline
We're working with climate change scientists, ecologists, energy analysts and green economists to draw up an over-arching timeline that provides a timebased landscape on which to draw your EDAP.
Transition Network Support - Resilience indicators
This sections introduces the concept of "resilience indicators", and this needs some explanation. Resilience is the ability of a system or community to withstand impacts from outside. An indicator is a way of measuring that.
Conventionally, the principal way of measuring a reducing carbon footprint is CO2 emissions. However, we firmly believe that cutting carbon while failing to build resilience is an insufficient response when you're trying to address both peak oil and climate change.
So how might you be able to tell that the resilience of the settlement in quesiton is increasing?
Resilience indicators might look at the following:
• percentage of food grown locally
• amount of local currency in circulation as a percentage of total money in circulation
• number of businesses locally owned
• average commuting distances for workers in the town
• average commuting distance for people living in the town but working outside it
• percentage of energy produced locally
• quantity of renewable building materials
• proportion of essential goods being manufactured within the community of within a given distance
• proportion of compostable "waste" that is actually composted
While some indicators will be universal, many will be place-specific and will emerge from the energy descent plan process. We're thinking hard about a full set of universal resilience indicators and we'll publish them to the network when they're ready.
The Energy Descent Action Plan
Incidentally, some people in the transitioning communities are calling this a "pathway" or a "vision" as opposed to a "plan". Whatever works for you if fine with us.
In essence, the EDAP will paint a picture of the community that is so colourful, so appealing and so irresistible, that anyone not involved in bringing it to fruition will feel bereft of meaning in their life.
And here's how to do it (at least, this is as far as we've got in figuring it out):
1. Build a local resource picture: gather data for your community relating to each of the working groups: arable land, transport options, health provision, renewable energy sources, textile manufacturing capability, building materials. This may well have been done in the early stages of the working groups' activities.
• Transition Network will provide templates for this
2. Create a vision for the community in 15-20 years hence: what would your community look like in 15 or 20 years if we were emitting drastically less CO2, using drastically less non-renewable energy, and was well on the way to rebuilding resilience in all critical aspects of life.
• Transition Network will provide resilience indicators to help focus your visioning exercise
3. Backcast from the vision to "today": list out a timeline of the milestones, prerequisites, activities and processes that need to be in place for the visions to be achieved. The resilience indicators will help shape this phase.
• Transition Network will be providing an over-arching UK Transition Timeline to assist this process
4. Get the Local Community Plan and Partnership Strategy as produced by the local government. Their plans are likely to have timescales and elements that you need to take into account.
5. Transition Tales: meanwhile the Transition Tales group is producing articles, stories, pictures and representations of the envisioned community, how we'd get there and what might happen on the way.
6. Create the first draft of the EDAP: merge the overall plan and the transition stories into one cohesive whole, and pass out for review and consultation.
7. Finalise the EDAP: integrate the feedback into the EDAP. Realistically, this document (if that's what it ends up being) won't ever be "final" - it will be continually updated and augmented as conditions change and ideas emerge.
This is a living process and we won't know how close it is to reality until a few groups have gone through it.
Transition Network is building plans to support this process by providing elements such as a set of standard resilience indicators, and an overarching master timeline covering energy, climate, food etc.
