The Story of Transition Town Totnes
TTT has been a story of ordinary people motivated not by fear and despondency, but rather by inspiration and the desire to create a positive response to peak oil and climate change. Initiated in late 2005, it has grown, since its ‘Official Unleashing’ in September 2006, to become a significant influence in the town. TTT has always been seen as a catalyst, its role being to inspire and nurture projects, and to support them with fundraising, office facilities, networking and so on. The work done here has gone on to inspire an international movement, as thousands of communities around the world draw from the Totnes experience in designing their own similar projects.
Transition is based on the following four assumptions:
- That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it’s better to plan for it than be taken by surprise
- That our communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil
- That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now
- That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy future, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that recognize the biological limits of our planet
Since its inception, it has catalysed, supported and fundraised for projects as diverse as the Totnes Pound, the Gardenshare Scheme, the Transition Together group study course, the Totnes Local Food Directory, the Nut Tree Plantings, re-skilling courses around gardening, run a wide and extensive programme of events and courses, run Transition Tales, a visioning the future project, with all of Year 7 at KEVICC (two years running) , donated almost £2,000 worth of books to Totnes Library, run an International Youth Music Festival, held a series of Open Space events, run World Cafe events with local councillors, Oil Vulnerability Audits for local business, the Solar Thermal Challenge, Totnes Renewable Energy Society (a community owned energy company), regular seed exchanges and much more .
It has also become a catalyst and an inspiration for one of the fastest growing social movements in the world, the Transition movement. Inspired by the model and the tools developed here, groups in places as diverse as San Francisco, the Isle of Wight, Fujino in Japan and Biggar in Scotland, have begun their own Transition initiatives. Somerset County Council and Leicestershire County Council have both passed resolutions supporting their local initiatives, and Ed Milliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, recently said, “how do we build a popular movement on these issues? Movements come from individual experiences that raise consciousness of the issues and are translated into bigger demands. So local campaigns and action whether it’s the Transition Town movement or pioneering local authorities – are absolutely essential. Not just because they are important in themselves but because they can help create a movement for change”.
This Energy Descent Plan has been one of TTT’s key initiatives. It is a drawing together of all the threads of TTT’s work thus far, creating a unique perspective on the future. As well as creating an EDAP for Totnes, it has also been a process of developing a methodology for doing them, which will be of use to hundreds of other communities. One of the things that Transition Town Totnes has done is to put the town on the map as a centre of innovative thinking about sustainability and how to implement it. While this plan sets out just one story of how that might come about, the process by which it actually happens will, similarly, be of great inspiration to many other communities facing the same challenges.
Transition Town Totnes display cart at Eden Project (© Jacqi Hodgson)
Leave a comment
If you wish to comment on a particular paragraph
and quote the relevant number in your comment.