Rob Hopkins, in his new book “The Transition Handbook – from Oil Dependency to Local Resilience”, outlines practical community based solutions that are needed to be taken to protect the area from the ramifications of climate change and peak oil. The handbook can be described as a manual of courses to skill people up for this challenge. Transition Town Initiatives are the embodiment of community driven holistic regional planning, with a strong focus on food security. Four key assumptions of Transition are:

1. That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable.
2. That communities presently lack resilience.
3. That we have to act collectively.
4. That the collectively genius of a community can be powerful.

The Transition Town Movement began in the English town of Totnes through the leadership of Rob Hopkins. Having successfully created an Energy Descent Plan for Kinsale in Ireland, which was later adopted as policy by the town council, Rob moved to Totnes in Devon and organized Transition Town Totnes, the first UK town to address ways to transition to a low fossil fuel future. Since the Totnes adoption of Transition initiatives, many other communities in Europe have adopted the Transition Model for responding to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

This movement is spreading to the United States, with several cities adopting these principals, and dozens more considering doing so. Boulder, Colorado became the first U.S. Transition Town, and Sandpoint, Idaho recently confirmed its Transition strategy. Some cities still have 19^th century “bones”, such as Portland, Maine (i.e. thriving in many respects before the age of cheap oil) and still have many assets, skills and resources than can make transition to a post-carbon future very attainable.

I haven’t yet read The Transition Handbook, but am planning to. If you’re interested in learning how the Transition approach differs from conventional environmentalism in its group approach, proactivity and resilience ideas, visit the books publishers; Green Books in the UK and Chelsea Green in the USA.

To learn which cities are considering kicking off their own Transition Initiatives, visit the Transition Towns WIKI.

Other books worthy of mention are:

The Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. This book, written by members of Austin’s Rhizome Collective, is a DIY guide for creating locally-based, ecologically sustainable communities in today’s cities.

Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change, shows how each person's individual choices can dramatically reduce CO2 emissions. It offers specific strategies in the areas of food, transportation, and housing.

Lyle Estill’s Small is Possible introduces us to “hometown security”, with this chronicle of a community-powered response to resource depletion in the global economy. The true stories, from Chatham County, North Carolina, show how the small southern US town discovered it is possible for a community to feed itself, fuel itself, and heal itself.