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Transition Town Rhayader & District
 The Transition Town initiative helps bring local communities together to find ways of coping with the challenges and opportunities of climate
change and the inevitable decreasing
availability of cheap oil.
In Mid Wales, the small market town of Rhayader and its surrounding villages is part of this growing grass-roots movement where people like you get involved and make things happen. There are Transition Towns throughout Wales, England and Ireland and now all over the world.
By bringing the community together we can gain experience, information and inspiration from all.
Joining us means you will be helping all of us find ways to produce, distribute and consume the basic essentials of daily life, so that national resources can be better directed towards producing what cannot be made
available locally.
Becoming a more sustainable community will be challenging but we aim to influence the direction of change so that our lives are enriched and a secure future is protected for the next generation.
What can you do?
Click on the options in the side bar for ideas to help you develop your own approach to dealing with both climate change and oil and gas decline in six areas of your life.
For more information on Transition Town Rhayader & District or the Transition movement in general or to find out how you can become part of this exciting movement click here.
Transition Town Rhayader & District
is supported by:-
 
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The Aims of Transition Town Rhayader & District include:-
· raising awareness about peak oil and climate change and the need for the community to find ways to reduce carbon emissions and become resilient to the changes.
· organise, encourage and promote projects that bring people together to build an understanding about carbon issues and the need to become sustainable.
· developing links with local government to foster and promote sustainable strategies.
· liaising with existing groups in the community and building links between differing age and social groups.
· setting up focus-groups to map-out sustainable solutions in the key areas of life - energy, housing, transport, food, health, finance, community, leisure, spiritual wellbeing, etc.
· work towards defining and launching a community defined, community implemented "Energy Descent Action Plan" over a 15 to 20 year timescale.
· working co-operatively with other transition initiatives.
For more information please click here |
Peak Oil
Climate Change and Peak Oil are sometimes referred to as the 'Hydrocarbon Twins'. Whilst climate change is becoming a familiar concept, peak oil is less well known. It is the term given to describe the peaking of production of cheap, easily available oil, not its complete absence. For further information on peak oil go to www.powerswitch.org.uk.
Peak oil is an acknowledged problem, not just by environmentalists but by the oil industry itself. If you combine falls in production of easily available oil with increased demand from a growing population and developing economies as well as our own, the price is forecast to rise enormously with consequent social and economic effects. The time scale for feeling the fall out from these effects is being put at a few years, less than 5 for significant change.
Just thinking back on the last petrol strike will remind us of what a drop in supply can do.
For a view of effects – the film most often shown to communities considering becoming transition towns is ‘The End of Suburbia’. www.endofsuburbia.com
Another film, interesting even though it deals with a community with a different climate and political system, looks at what happened when Cuba had to deal with a long term oil embargo, emulating the post peak oil period ‘The power of community’ www.powerofcommunity.org
For information about Transition Town Rhayader & District please click here
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Brief History of the Transition Town Movement
The Transition movement was started in Kinsale, Ireland, in 2003 by a permaculture lecturer called Rob Hopkins. He asked his students to do a study to identify the ways in which their town used oil. This led to a realisation of how much the community depended on oil for transport, food production, medicine, energy production, communications, housing and leisure. They found that nearly every area of life was affected by oil price and availability.
The students were then asked to design a plan for living after oil had become too scarce and expensive to be used in practical terms to do what it does now. This resulted in the production of the Kinsale 2021 Energy Descent Action Plan (google to find copy) which has since be adopted by the town council.
Rob Hopkins now lives in Totnes, Devon which has become an exemplar transition town. To date there are 251 official transition towns in 15 countries around the world, with Rhayader & District being the 36th official community to register with the national network.
Although the concept of Transition Towns was developed as a way of surviving in an era of expensive oil, their ethos and ideas also help deal with climate change.
The movement has caught people’s imaginations because it offers empowerment and a framework within which to work to bring about the changes on the ground that best suit the individual communities, all of whom will be affected by the changes that climate change and post peak oil will bring.
For more information on the national network see
http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork
or
http://www.transitionculture.org
For further information about
Transition Town Rhayader & District
please click here |
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