or should that be tripling?
Louth is the 98th Transition Town, but just beating us at 97th is Katoomba. After contacting them I received this reply:
Fantastic to hear from you!
Would love to exchange thoughts, experiences ideas etc. We are a small group, started after a meeting in July, and
still working out how to do this really. We are planning our public activities to start early 2009 and have a very
basic website at the moment but good support from council and enthusiastic responses from local people who know about
us so far.
Love the front page of your website, great photo and events listing. Our website builder has had to withdraw from the group so we are hunting for someone else to give us a more active site.
How long have you been going? I notice you have a constitution, we are yet to get there, but very much looking forward to training in February with 2 trainers from the UK.
The town of Katoomba (pop 10,000) is part of a string of villages in the Blue Mountains, just west of Sydney, starting on the western plains of the city and rising to a height of about 1000 metres. It gets very cold here, not your stereotypical Australian landscape at all. TK covers the upper mountains, a series of villages (some separate, some continguous) with an active, alternative community with lots of TT-type activities well established e.g. we have had a food coop here for about 12 years and an established community garden and permaculture network. But also a very diverse population with many people who aren’t remotely interested in sustainability or local self-reliance … yet!
Look forward to hearing more about your area and process of establishment.
Cheers and thanks for making contact.
Brenda Finlayson
The Blue Mountains are a series of deep and wide valleys fringed with plunging sandstone escarpments.
The villages run along the ridgeline … here’s where I walk my dog Leo:
You can get in touch with Brenda by e-mailing: info@transitionkatoomba.org.au
And following Louth, the 99th transition town is Santa Cruz, on the Californian coast.
Transition Santa Cruz is a collaborative effort to prepare Santa Cruz for a future in which cheap, abundant energy is no longer available. We aim to become resilient and able to handle the stresses of peak oil and climate change, by building a thriving local economy and community that is not heavily dependent on any particular outside resource. In the process, we will be taking some of the most effective steps we can take to reduce our impact on the climate system.
Key to Transition Santa Cruz is the notion that a post-fossil-fuel future could be better in many ways than life in our current society. We are committed to exploring and creating concrete manifestations of positive visions of life after oil, by working at a grassroots level and unleashing the creative genius of our community. The twin global crises of peak oil and climate change are two aspects of a single problem, which is over-reliance on fossil fuels. Climate change, and the need to respond to it with changes in our high carbon emissions, is increasingly well understood by many people. Understanding of the reality of peak oil (and other fossil fuels) lags somewhat behind, yet it is an important part of realistic planning for our future. With its focus on “what goes into the gas tank,” as opposed to the climate-change-driven focus on what comes out of the tailpipe, the peak oil focus is an invaluable tool for galvanizing action on energy use. Therefore, one of the first tasks of Transition Santa Cruz is to raise awareness about peak oil.
The entire era of cheap energy, which began in the mid-1800s, has been a very brief, exceptional period of human history, with an unprecedented growth of population and economies, and consumption of the Earth’s resources. By now, virtually everything we use in our everyday lives depends on fossil fuels. Especially in the industrialized countries, everything we eat, wear, live in, transport ourselves with, warm ourselves with, etc., represents the consumption of large amounts of fossil fuel energy. In the process of becoming so reliant on these fuels, we have lost many of the basic living skills, and much of the community interconnectedness that we once had. There is no good replacement source of energy on the scale that we are used to consuming fossil fuel energy. When this fact is combined with the pressing need to stop greenhouse gas emissions, it becomes clear that we have an immediate need for a plan for living in a much less energy-consuming way. Such a plan is known as an Energy Descent Action Plan. There is no sign that such a plan is on the horizon at the national or state levels of government. Towns and cities need to take the lead. Fortunately, this is now beginning to happen. Large cities, like Portland, OR, and small towns, like Willits, CA, have passed Peak Oil resolutions and are beginning to take action.
One of the most effective movements in this direction comes from England under the name Transition Initiatives. These are grassroots movements for educating local citizens about the challenges ahead, and inspiring people with the possibility that a low-energy-use future could be better than our current lifestyle. They include as many people as possible in the process of imagining such a future, and creating visible projects that demonstrate the reclaiming of lost living skills, the re-purposing of land to increase local self-reliance, the shift from a global to a local economy, and so on. Ultimately, Transition Initiatives result in the creation of Energy Descent Action Plans with a strong base of support in the community. As of September, 2008, about 127 U.S. towns and cities had groups working on Transition Initiatives. Transition Santa Cruz, the 99th recognized Transition Initiative worldwide, is proud that Santa Cruz is one of them!
Picture source