Towns in transition

Planning for when the oil runs out

By FRITZ MAYER

SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — Back in the summer of 2008, when gasoline was selling at more than $4 a gallon, the end of cheap oil seemed perilously near. People switched from oil furnaces to coal, and sales of sport utility vehicles plummeted.

Then came the recession, or what some called a panic, and oil prices collapsed. With that plummet, it seemed that cheap oil might be around a bit longer. Now, with gas prices inching up toward $3, the end of cheap oil is again in sight and some people are thinking beyond fossil fuels.

For others, the prospect of a major global energy convulsion never went away.

At the Sullivan Renaissance conference in February, author and keynote speaker James Howard Kunstler predicted jarring social changes coming our way, changes coming not just because of peak oil, meaning the time when oil supplies are in decline as demand increases, but also because of global climate change and global economic turmoil.

Those changes are also a concern of Liberty resident Tim Shera and Livingston Manor resident Maria Grimaldi. And as a way of dealing with them, Shera and Grimaldi are hosting a Transition Towns-Sullivan County meeting on June 9, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Sullivan on Ferndale Loomis Road in Liberty.

Shera said, “I foresee great changes coming at us which will require us to live differently, require us to live with less, which won’t be a bad thing at all. And live more as a community and to take care of one another. So, we called this meeting to start planning for these changes, specifically for this area, Sullivan County. How are we going to get enough food here for everybody, if we can’t be transporting it 1,500 miles after the price of fuel gets so high?” The questions go on, and some of them are answered with the concept of Transition Towns.

The Transition Towns movement grew out of the work of educator Rob Hopkins at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland. In early 2006, Hopkins started a Transition Towns program in Totnes, England and the concept took off across the country. It has since spread around the globe, as groups in other communities copied the model and initiated the transition process in their own locales.

In his book, titled the “Transition Towns Handbook,” Hopkins urges groups and communities to tackle issues like food, energy and waste, and to go so far as to develop their own local currencies.

In a video on You Tube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGHrWPtCvg0, Hopkins says, “The future with less oil could be preferable to the present, if we could engage with enough imagination, creativity and adaptability in that process. There’s no reason why the creativity and imagination that got us up to the top of the peak in the first place, is going to disappear when we start to work out how we’re going to get down the other side.

“In Totnes, some of the things that have come out, the Totnes Pound, the currency system which we’ve set up; the Totness local food directory, which lists all the local food producers; Totnes the Nut Tree Capital of Britain, which is about planting nut trees within the urban fabric of the town, which is an awareness-raising project and also a food-security project. So, change need not be a hair-shirt exercise. It can be something that is exhilarating, has a feel of being an historic process, and is a collective call to adventure. What transition initiatives are about is unlocking the collective genius of the community to explore these questions.”

Official Transition Towns initiatives have spread to the United States, where 27 communities are involved. Some of those signing up are in places that have been linked to progressive and experimental programs in the past, such as Boulder, CO and Ann Arbor, MI. But others with more conservative reputations have also jumped on the bandwagon, such as Ketchum, ID and Oklahoma City, OK.

Go to transitionus.ning.com/profile/MariaGrimaldi for more information.