The TimesOnline has just published a very good article about the Transition Town initiative that has arisen out of the UK in the last two years. As in many other communities, a handful of people in Cumberland and the Comox Valley are "mulling it over", however:

In some 700 towns, villages and cities worldwide, Transition is under way, and more communities are signing up every day. Most of the groups are “mulling” - Transition-speak for gearing themselves up - but 114 have launched publically, or “unleashed”.

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Certainly the town is full of traffic. Hopkins, 38, mentions a recent pilgrim who turned up, unannounced, from Germany: “He said that he'd come all the way to Totnes expecting to find an eco-Shangri-La and was horrified that we still had cars.”

Yet if reliance on the internal combustion engine persists in Totnes for now, Transition is slowly changing things. Early successes include a garden-share scheme - those with gardens but who don't tend them are partnered with people who are garden-less but want to grow food, and both parties share the proceeds. The Totnes Food Guide is a comprehensive directory of food producers within five miles of the town: buy groceries from them and you are using minimal oil. A scheme with an epic sobriquet, The Great Re-Skilling will teach you how to make your own paint, knit with recycled materials, master clay plastering and build straw bales. And a drive to plant walnut trees - which apparently yield 7 to 11 tonnes of carbohydrate per hectare - around the town has gone well, even though the first saplings were vandalised (“the mistake was to plant them near where teenagers hang around and get drunk,” says Hopkins).

Full article HERE.


For information about Transition Town Cumberland, click HERE.