Transition Vermont

Transition Town movement comes to Vermont!

snip:
At a workshop in Grafton on Monday on how to finance local food systems, at least three of us sat ready to promote the Transition Town model. To the others in the room, it may have looked like a coordinated effort among the three of us. It wasn't; we were simply enthusiastic about the same thing.

Will Rapp, founder of Gardener's Supply and Intervale Composting, struck first. He held up his copy of "The Transition Handbook," by Rob Hopkins, and told the assembled activists, policymakers and financiers that the Transition model is crucial to building sustainable local food systems. He passed his copy around. That prompted Margo Baldwin, co-owner of the book's U.S. distributor, Chelsea Green, to pull out her copy and send it around the room, too.

I had something else to pass around: Posters for the Montpelier visit of Naresh Giangrande, a co-founder of the first Transition Town in the United Kingdom (see sidebar).

The Transition Town model is a very different way to address peak oil and climate change than most of those now getting headlines. We hear a lot about getting other people to do something: Bild electric cars, erect wind turbines, re-build passenger rail or sign the Kyoto Protocol. In Transition Towns, people get together themselves to weatherize each others' homes, repair bicycles, create community gardens, and plant nut and fruit trees in parks and along streets.

Without the sort of vision that the Transition Town model presents, change is difficult. Many proposals to address peak oil and climate change make little sense. Proposed responses to oil shortages, for example, include massive investments in corn ethanol, offshore drilling, oil shale and tar sands – investments that worsen the climate crisis while merely slowing the decline in liquid fuel availability. And proposed responses to climate change include dumping loads of iron filings in the southern oceans and hoping they stimulate algae blooms which take carbon dioxide out of circulation. Ideas like these spring from hopes that some form of business-as-usual responses can meaningfully address the biggest challenges of the 21st century.