Transition Towns are towns preparing for oil crisis and beyond.
The best plans are made by the inhabitants of the Town. They work on the principle that when enough people lead, the leaders will follow.
Essentially A Transition Town Plan enables:
- Diversity of productive and leisure activities
- Sharing of resources (including better public transport and health systems)
- Food grown and distributed within the local area
- Co-operative and creative approaches to solving local problems such as modular housing, modular transport, multi-functional spaces and tools.
There are a number of Towns that have prepared a plan, see www.transitiontowns.org
There are also some great educators on the topic such as Ted Trainer of Pigface Point – 50-acre alternative lifestyle education site, global consumption and lifestyle trends, future technologies and lifestyles for healthy people and a healthy Earth. Dr Ted Trainer is a visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of NSW. Ted Trainer is not doing much food growing at this stage but there were plenty of old chicken houses including a miniature thatched roof mansion and old veggie-gardens, he is a lecturer and has a very wimsical approach to landscape. hose pump, homemade chair Part of his site was designed for fun (bridges, arches, islands, caves, etc.) and other parts was for purpose (dams, rammed earth shed – see photo, cob oven, home made furniture from found branches).
He uses his site as a model to show people how to create an interconnected, resourced and equiped ‘village’ or housing complex. He has a lot of energy experiments (tidal energy, water wheels, methane gas, composting toilets, etc.) He’s like a happy nutty professor let out of the lab! For years I had believed someone else that said that methane converter couldn’t work in our cooler climate, now i know that to be untrue simple biogas chambers off composting toilets will work in subtropics. Ted had one working off his toilet. He also had some low-tech stuff which I really love, like a simple hose coiled to pump water as you turn it. He had some great scaled models of a villages or suburbs that converts to low energy (post carbon). Recommended DVD:- The Power of community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil
See our posts on community gardens, city farms and village living. Permaculture Visions also trades with local residents who wish to upskill in permaculture and are willing to work on our site. Contact us for details.
