"Transition Towns" Tackle Climate Change

Transition towns — part of a grassroots movement to help communities adopt carbon-neutral lifestyles — are slowly spreading from England, where they number in the scores, to America, New Zealand and elsewhere.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the “transition movement” helps equip communities with tools for living in a world of climate change and declining oil reserves.

The concept was born three years ago when permaculture professor Rob Hopkins and his students came up with a plan for community-wide sustainable living in his hometown of Totnes, United Kingdom.

Since then more than 100 communities worldwide have joined in, three of which are in the United States: Boulder, Co., and Sandpoint and Ketchum, Idaho.

A few of the towns in England even use their own currency, the article reports, to “stimulate the local economy and help insulate it from the vagaries of the national and global markets.’

Practical elements of the a transition town include planting community food gardens, reducing long-distance transportation, business waste exchanges, learning how to repair old items rather than throw them away, and switching to renewable energy sources.

–Julia Hengst/Newsdesk.org

Source:

“Communities plan for a low-energy future”
The Christian Science Monitor, September 11, 2008

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