Transition Towns

The May meeting of 21st Century Network will be about Transition Towns. Mike Grenville will set an overview and then we will have two other speakers who have set up transition town groups in their own area.

We will then break into groups and each group will be facilitated to look at how we can make the transition from a high energy economy in our own areas to one that responds to the challenges of oil production peaking and climate change meaning we all must reduce our carbon footprint. Our Climate Change Group is facilitating this part of the meeting.

Mike Grenville is a technology journalist and event organiser focussed on the mobile messaging industry. He has campaigned for many years on environmental issues and has been behind a number of front-page newspaper reports. More recently he established the Transition Forest Row project to engage the community to respond to the challenges of both Climate Change and Peak Oil. The Transition Town approach is for the community to build local resilience and develop its own energy descent plan to a way of living beyond oil.

Lucy Neal OBE is an independent arts producer specialising in participatory, celebratory events. A writer and broadcaster, she was co-founder director of the LIFT Festival (1981-2005). An initiator of Transition Town Tooting, (TTT) she has lived in the southwest London community of Tooting for 22 years. TTT’s first steps in creating a collective response to peak oil and climate change build on Tooting’s strong ethos of community cohesion, diversity and celebration. Lucy enjoys swimming year round at the Tooting Bec Lido.

Duncan Law has been deeply involved in the Transition Towns Brixton project, because it promotes community spirit, and and make a difference quickly: "I've found that climate change deals with the invisible and has very little positivity about it, whereas this is all about positivity. Everybody can get stuck in and design the change - it is very much a bottom-up initiative." Trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Duncan has worked in Rep at Liverpool, Chester, Northampton, Leicester, Basingstoke, Westcliff, York, Greenwich and Gawsworth Hall playing leading and character roles from Romeo to Humphrey Bogart.

In this video clip Duncan Law discusses climate change, peak oil and Transition initiatives, in particular the Transition Brixton project.

What Is The Transition Town Movement?
It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?

They begin by forming an initiating group and then adopt the Transition Model with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative.

A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG 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)?