WHAT IS TRANSITION LOSTWITHIEL?

The Transition Towns movement is a rapidly growing community-led response to the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil. The first is fairly well understood, the second is beginning to gain more media exposure.

What is Peak Oil?

Most people are quite familiar with climate change and its causes and effects, but what does peak oil mean? Quite simply that the era of being able to burn ever increasing quantities of finite fossil fuels to sustain our current way of life by definition will come to an end. The laws of physics, geological science, the technical challenges of drilling ever deeper, in ever more inhospitable places, for oil; these are all factors that have led many experts to predict that regardless how much oil is left underground, the rate at which we can pump it out is bound to start to fall... permanently... year on year.

The growth of consumerism, globalisation, deforestation, the disposable society, greenhouse gases: these have been driven, literally, by an abundance of cheap fossil fuel (and particularly in the past century by oil and gas). This era of cheap fossil fuel is coming to an end. If you regularly fill up a car with petrol, or you have had an electricity or gas bill drop on your doormat recently, you probably don't need convincing of this. The number of houses being disconnected by energy companies in the UK has risen threefold since 2005. There are many countries in the developing world which are suffering regular black-outs as they struggle to keep their electrical grids powered up.

Now over a billion Chinese and a billion Indians want an energy intensive Western consumer lifestyle too, and they have as much of a right to it as we do. These resources will become more expensive and increasingly scarce and so as a society, globally, nationally and locally, we need to be a lot more choosy about how we use them. The same substance that pushes 4x4's around the streets of Chelsea is also a vital feedstock to medical sciences, and completely underpins our current food industry.

What is our response?

Well, we can sit back, wait to be buffeted by events outside our control, trust in our wise and enlightened political masters and hope for the best... or, as a community we can take charge of this transition away from an energy intensive, throwaway society.

In many ways this is only returning to the natural order of things. One of the central themes of Transition Towns is to honour our elders, because they remember times when it was second nature to conserve resources, to be self-reliant. Maybe it is the past 40 - 50 years that's out of step with reality - not the preceding several thousand. Maybe there is nothing to fear from having to do without the worst excesses of our high-octane consumer society. Maybe this is an opportunity to recapture some best aspects of the past that we feel we have lost, and at the same time keeping many of the advances of the present day.

Here are a few things that don't have to be heavily advertised, manufactured out of plastic, and imported from China:

• Love and friendship
• Human ingenuity
• Artistic and cultural achievement
• Satisfaction from honest work well done
• Community solidarity

None of these resources are finite, and none have yet reached their peak.