transition towns

Transition Towns is a widespread community project, now spanning cities across the globe, designed to proactively build resilience into cities in preparation for peak oil and climate change. Actions include permaculture, education, energy usage reduction, and other sustainable living endeavors. Rachel Roddam, of the Transition Towns movement in Tasmania, Derwent, and on WiserEarth, shares her story here.

Guest post by Rachel Roddam

This post was originally published on 12/2/10 in the WiserEarth Community Newsletter

I was lucky enough to fall into the Transition Towns community just over 2 years ago in Tasmania. It feels like 10 years, so again I remind myself to take a moment to celebrate our achievements!

When I came across Transition Tasmania our web presence was limited to an event on our local Sustainable Living site. Now I’m no IT expert, so please bear with me. We threw together what I call our static site. It has basic info plus a map so newbies can find a Transition group near them. Being the author of much of the content, I wasn’t satisfied that there was a middleman between me and publishing (that tends to lead me to procrastination!), also I was worried that the site really wasn’t very interactive. If people want to shout about what they are up to in their community, I’d like to see that they can do that when and where it suits them.

Our next stop was Ning. We established a social site which had a quick uptake of membership, but before long we found ourselves paying. Our community is young and we didn’t want to rely on funding to maintain our web-based network, so we began looking round for an alternative.

Lo and behold, over and over I heard “WiserEarth”. Looking into WE at first glance I thought it looked a little clinical. But at second glance I was sold. The accessibility of the staff, their friendly, helpful attitude. A clincher for me was the fact that I can post an event for one group, then quickly and easily search for it and post it to another group without inputting all the info again.

I see a lot of potential for info sharing in this way between Transition and related groups who embrace the WiserEarth community.

On a personal note, I have really enjoyed making connections around the world via the WE site. It is against my ethics to travel internationally again and increase my carbon footprint, despite having much loved relatives in England and Poland. WE takes the connections around the world to a new level beyond Skype and Facebook.

This is a safe community and its great to have the freedom to act with integrity to my own beliefs and interests.

I have had several groups referred to me to start up websites for them and I’m thrilled to watch Transition Lorinna especially as it embraces Transition and its website to set up with incredible speed tools such as a localised car pooling site. It’s exciting to watch as the internet becomes a powerful tool for the good that is going on around us.

My 10 year old asks, “When can there be a Transition site for children?” I’d love to see this addressed.

Rachel Roddam

Transition Tasmania

Transition Derwent

More on Transition Towns:

http://www.transitiontowns.org/

http://transitionnetwork.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns

Transition Tasmania on WiserEarth: http://www.wiserearth.org/group/TransitionTas

Permanent link to this article on WiserEarth

Photo by kimtimnashville

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