Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
Transition Towns and EcoDistricts:
Local Sustainable Initiatives
Wayne KD Davies
For all those aspects of life that this community needs in order
to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase
resilience, to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil, and drastically
reduce carbon emissions to mitigate the effects of Climate
Change….Our mission is to inspire, inform, support, network
and train communities as they consider, adopt and implement
a Transition Initiative—through a range of materials, training
courses, events, tools and technical resources (Transition Town
Primer 2006).
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Introduction
The last decade has seen the development of local and grass-roots organizations
designed to implement greater sustainability at a local level. The most well-known
is the movement called Transition Towns (TT) which operates primarily at a set-
tlement level, while a recent organization called EcoDistricts focuses mainly on
the inner city neighbourhood scale. These are local, citizen-inspired sustainabil-
ity movements to increase local resilience in settlements. The background to both
movements lies in increasing ecological concern among many people of the current
human exploitation of the environment and the unsustainable nature of so many
modern processes. However the Transition Town movement has been sparked by
two specific environmental concerns that were discussed in Chap. 5. One is the
negative consequences of global warming produced by increased carbon dioxide
emissions from our expanding industrialised and consumer society and the appar-
ent inability of governments to do much about the problem through international
agreements. The second came from a belief in the impending impact of the Peak Oil
theory. In origin it was a descriptive model that applied to the United States when
production peaked and then declined from the early 1970s. But increasing supplies
