coolmelbourne.org

Chances are you have already heard the terms ‘Transition Town’, ‘Transition Network’, ‘Transition Movement’ or ‘Transition Initiative’ floating around, creeping into conversations and news stories. You may have Googled it and come away a convert or perhaps a bit befuddled. Maybe you’re already a part of a Transition Initiative (in which case you probably don’t need to read on), or maybe you’ve been thinking about it and you want to know more.

We’ve been doing some Transition reading, and we think it’s a great idea that will grow and grow, and is definitely something we should all be thinking more about.

So what is this ‘Transition’ business? Well, it seems to us that summing up the meaning of the movement in one or two sentences is a bit tricky. It seems to us that it is an idea that is only really defined by the doing of it, and that for each group doing it the experience will be different. Therefore the definition will also be different.  But we’ll give it a go.

The Transition Movement started as a community project based around planning for a reduction (and eventual elimination) of oil and its sub-products in our daily lives, both for economic reasons (oil is getting scarcer and more expensive) and for climate change reasons (avoid using oil so as to reduce carbon dioxide emissions).

However its scope far exceeds transport and also includes housing, food and culture.

Unlike previous schemes, this is described as a hybrid approach, aiming to take communities and local businesses on board and planning for a sustainable, economically viable future together.

Still confused? Here are a few descriptions that we came across that help to describe the purpose of the movement:


The aim of the project is to equip communities for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil.

AND

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)?"