About Transition Initiative Portland (TIP) Meetup Group

What is TIP?

We are community members who want to prepare for the challenges that Peak Oil and Climate Change will bring to the Portland Area.  To do this, we are looking at a model provided by Transition Towns in the U.K., Australia, Ireland, and now the U.S.  Transition Towns evolved from permaculture, as seen through the eyes of Rob Hopkins (http://transitioncult... The only answer that the Transition Town model prescribes is the need for local resilience: our community's ability to withstand shock and bounce back to a healthy state.  Instead of giving answers, the model poses the right questions, and asks our community to engage in open conversation and idea-exchange to find these solutions for ourselves, on a local level.

Transition Towns stress the important of three key factors to resilience:

1.  Diversity - as in permaculture, the first source of resilience in a system is in the diversity of its life

2.  Modularity - when one part of the system falls apart, that shouldn't spell doom for the rest: by stacking functions and promoting diversity, a system evolves many interconnected relationships that reinforce resilience

3.  Tightness of Feedbacks - the more local the consequences of our actions, the more we'll be inclined to respect our ecosystem, which is essential for local resilence; loose feedbacks, on the other hand, were created when we globalized commerce with fossil fuels, creating, in turn, Climate Change.

These key ideas form the basis for local resilience in ecosystems, communities, food, water, health, education, economy and on through every aspect of our lives.  Beyond these key concepts, the Transition Model asks the community to come together to address these issues and create local, practical solutions.

TIP's goal is to facilitate and catalyze our community in addressing these questions.  We will do this through Raising Awareness of Peak Oil, Climate Change and the need to address the issues locally.  We will do this through Outreach to our community and the many people and groups already addressing these issues.  Ultimately, we hope to build for a great Unleashing, in which we celebrate the first steps of creating our own Energy Descent Action Plan.  Our EDAP is a community-developed plan with practical and positive steps to decrease our energy lifestyle as easily available, cheap, energy-rich fossil fuels peak in their production and become uneconomical resources.  

We are built on the principles of:

* inclusion
* working on practical solutions for the present and future, not looking to the past to lay blame
* think globally, act locally
* Open Space technology (http://en.wikipedia.o...)
* bottom up solutions

Most importantly, Transition Initiative Portland is built on the belief that a future with less energy can be much brighter than the world we see today.  Come join us in building it!