Primers: What is Transition? Peak Oil and Mid-Wales Climate change and Mid-Wales

WHAT IS TRANSITION?

We all face, every one of us, two ongoing challenges: Peak Oil and Climate Change. These two issues will affect different communities in differing ways, depending on where they are on the planet, but they will affect us all in one way or another. They are transitions forced upon us from external, global sources, that mean that we, as communities, will need to develop coping mechanisms if we are to manage.


The Power of Community - Transition Initiatives

Transition Initiatives (or Transition Towns movements) have been springing up across the UK and Eire. There is a rapidly expanding number of them across Wales. At the core of what is known as "Transition Culture" is the recognition that the key to coping with the changes that will be forced up on us, around the world, is to undergo a much healthier kind of transition: to rebuild the resilience that communities once had and have to a varying extent lost in recent years.


Resilience - Relocalisation - Reskilling - Recognition

Resilience is a bit like developing immunity to killer diseases as a consequence of vaccination. It involves finding ways to strengthen the whole community so that, when external events are forced upon us by global economics, we are able, as a whole community, to cope.

It is about relocalisation - the need for a healthy local economy where many things we use are locally produced. As in the past, before cheap oil was widely available, there will always be things that we cannot produce locally and will need to import, and they will again be expensive. But there are a lot more things that we can produce and market locally, thereby at the same time keeping money within local economies, instead (as often happens today) of disappearing out of the area.

It is about reskilling - where we relearn the time-held trades of our elders before they become forgotten, known only in tales of the past, and without which we will face a difficult future in the absence of the cheap-oil economy. Our elderly are thus an incredibly important part of this.

And, first and foremost, at the present time, it is about recognition - understanding the nature of the soon-to-end cheap oil economy, the problems of supply and demand, the issues surrounding climate change and how all of this is likely to affect us in the future.


The Bro Ddyfi Transition Initiative

The Bro Ddyfi Transition Initiative began in 2007 and we are now an official member of the UK-wide Transition Network. At the moment, we are engaged in a programme of awareness-raising. It is important that as many people as possible can develop an appreciation of the concepts involved. To date, we have given presentations to audiences in Machynlleth and to the town's Council. In 2008, we will take these out to a wider audience right across the Bro Ddyfi Community. Please check out the Events section of this website to find out more.

Finally, we are not here to tell other people what to do. Through awareness-raising, and providing environments for in-depth discussion, it is our hope that we can start a ball rolling that leads to that resilient Bro Ddyfi Community that will be able to cope when global changes are foisted upon it. Currently in its early days, the Bro Ddyfi Transition Initiative has a small steering-committee of volunteers from a variety of backgrounds. Keeping things simple is the key: there is no power structure as such. The real power lies within the Community itself.

Primers: What is Transition? Peak Oil and Mid-Wales Climate change and Mid-Wales