Transition Far North Queensland

Just what is a ‘transition town’ and what happens in them?

Good question! Transition Towns are a relatively new concept. The first one was in Kinsale in Ireland in 2005. Although not then called a transition town, Kinsale was the first place in the world to ‘sign up’ to an energy descent action plan (EDAP).

This came about when a bloke called Rob Hopkins was working in the Kinsale Sustainable Education Centre. Rob was delivering the two-year permaculture course he had written. In one morning he shown his students the DVD The End of Suburbia and he invited well-known petroleum geologist Dr Colin Campbell (who lives in Kinsale) along to do a presentation on peak oil.

His students were stunned! They didn’t know about this issue and now they did. A mighty double hit of peak oil information in one morning.

So what did they do about it? They decided to apply permaculture principles to the problem. If you can make your own backyard energy efficient, stream line systems, design in solutions, conserve energy, why couldn’t you do it for a whole town?

They set to work and eventually produced the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan. They then presented this to the local council who in turn accepted it and began implementing their actions.

This is a very important event and is proving to be a very important document.

Here was a way forward – from the community, accepted by local government – and it was a PLAN! of ACTIONS no less.

Those of you who have been attending conferences, presentations and events based on climate change and peak oil will know that ACTIONS are very light on. Particularly ones that are practical, doable and achievable by the average person.

Rob Hopkins then moved back to the UK – to Totnes in Devon – and began turning that town into the world’s first official start up Transition Town. He took the lessons he learnt from the Kinsale EDAP, fine tuned the process, significantly increased the community engagement aspect and kicked it off.

If you would like to read Rob’s story I’d highly recommend the Transition Handbook and his blog.

So what does a Transition Town look like?

Firstly, it can be defined pretty much however you’d like to be defined – geographically, bioregionally, you can have a town, a village, a community, a city, a region.

What do they do – well a transition town will be

a) working on what is most relevant to their local area.

By that I mean – if they are near the coast, they might be focussed on sea level rises. If they are in the hinterland they may be looking at working on local food production, if they are not near public transport they may be looking at carpooling or car sharing.

In urban areas they may be looking at urbanisation of food supply – green roofs, balcony gardens, community gardens.

In a housing block they may be looking at starting a co-operative to bulk buy solar panels to provide some energy to their building.

People will be working on whatever is most pressing in their local area. The most vulnerable areas and the maximizing their areas of strength.

Staying relevant within your local community is vital.

b) the second driver of a Transition Town movement is the expertise within the core group.

This means, if you have someone in your group who has really good ideas about alternative economies or has run a LETS group before, finance may be your focus.

You might have a few people involved in the area of health, so you may have a very strong health collective within your Transition Town.

First of all finding, then building on people’s passions, skills, expertise and experience is important. There is a lot of collective genius out there – and Transition Towns helps you find it and put it to good use.

Here’s a couple of examples of what Transition Towns might look like:

Transition Sunshine Coast
TSC is a region wide initiative. It came about when a couple of locals saw the Kinsale EDAP and thought it would be a damn good idea to have one of those for the Sunshine Coast. So they made it happen. The Sunshine Coast EDAP will cover the entire area covered by the Sunshine Coast Regional Council. But this is not a council initiative – this is a community initiative. From the community, by the community, for the community and owned by the community. But of course, we need to work with and have the support of the council for three reasons.

Firstly, we need them to make law and legislative changes that will allow quick and effective moves to more resilient communities. We need them to changes things like building codes to allow smaller, more efficient (and more affordable) homes to be built on the Coast. We need them to make changes to the way land is valued to ensure prime agricultural land is not built on. We need them to allow multiple dwellings to be built on acreage – again to ease the pressure off those who are struggling to find a rental or buy a home (or in fact keep their existing home).

The second reason we need the Council’s support for this, is that local governments (everywhere internationally) will bear most of the brunt of the impacts of climate change and peak oil. Think about what happens now when there is a disaster. Yes the state and federal politicians will turn up at some point and offer money to rebuild and to assist those impacted upon in the early stages of the emergency. But it will be up to the local government to bear most of the costs, most of the work and most of the hardship of the actual disaster. And if or when climate change really kicks in and we get the predicted more intense, more frequent significant weather events – local government will be under even more pressure to respond. So it is in their best interest to ensure their constituents are safe, secure and looked after in an emergency. The only way to do that is to be prepared. This also applies to disruptions to local food supplies, economic crises (which will affect people’s ability to live in the area), and a multitude of other impacts from these global issues.

The third reason this is good for local government is that the people who work there usually live in the area. So proactively working on finding solutions in their region means their families, friends and futures are given a very good chance.

So getting local government on board and working cooperatively with them is a very important part of being a Transition Town.

But…

Don’t think for a minute that we – the community – should be relying in any way on any level of government to ‘fix’ this. We must all act. We must all take responsibility. We must all work on reducing our inputs and outputs. At home, at work, at play.

We need both.

We need an EDAP to give us the guidelines of what needs to be done.

We need the Transition movements happening in the community to action those EDAPs and make them relevant, useful and productive.

An EDAP covers all the things in our lives that are currently based on fossil fuel (either through carbon emissions we produce that are influencing climate change, or whether through our dependence on oil to provide them cheaply and quickly as it currently does).

The areas of your life that will be affected – food supply, energy supply, water supply, waste management services, building materials and costs, transport, fuel prices, the economy, personal finances and debt, means of communication and education, purchasing goods services products, health provision, culture, leisure time, perhaps even your job.

All of these are included in an Energy Descent Action Plan – identifying the problem, finding the solutions and working out how to make them happen.

Transition Town Eudlo
Eudlo has a population of 850 people. It’s located in the foothills of the Blackall Ranges, most people have acreage land, we have a school, a train station, a general store, a rural fire service, a town hall and a couple of other shops.

The TT Eudlo group have been going for about a year – although they have only just been officially recognised as a TT. What do they do? Well, they meet regularly and do things like – Permablitz each other’s gardens so more people are growing their own food. They are setting up a food co-op, they bulk buy food, they are working with other people in the community to set up things like a local market, edible landscape (cultivated and bush tuckers fruit and nut trees) in the local park. They’ve organised a spring picnic so the community can get together and meet each other.

This is what TT Eudlo looks like. People getting together and addressing what is important to them.

What does your Transition Town look like?

For more information about Transition Towns visit www.transitiontowns.org

This article was provided by Sonya Wallace permaculturepathways.blogspot.com