by Larry Saltzman
Larry Saltzman posted a letter to the new central coast Transition Town listserv. I immediately sensed its importance and askled him to flush it out.
Thank you HopeDance for starting the listserv devoted to the Transition Town effort on the West Coast. For those of you unfamiliar with the Transition Town Concept, read the Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins [visit http://tinyurl.com/5j57rn for details about the book as well as other details]. The Transition Town concept is a brilliant outgrowth of Permaculture design principles at work and lays out a coherent design for allowing communities around the world to prepare for the post carbon future we face, compounded by the problems of global climate disruption.
I also want to announce our progess to date in Santa Barbara, as we gear up our efforts towards the Transition. Linda Buzzell has been working tirelessly and successfully to start the first Transition Town effort in Santa Barbara and has succeeded. A group of us have already started the first Transition Town effort for the City of Santa Barbara and will be having our first formal meeting within the next two weeks [by the time you read this, they will have had their meeting]. We have already had informal discussions to plan out the process. Several of us are going to Los Angeles on September 20th for a day of meeting with other people from Southern California involved in Transition Town Efforts [see the URL above for details].
I personally plan on taking the Trainers training for Transition Town in the near future [see Jim Cole’s article in this issue about contacts and dates]. The Central Coast is blessed with a depth of people who have undertaken the Permaculture Design Course, or have some exposure to Permaculture. Most of our core board are design course graduates and all have some Permaculture training. The Central Coast is fortunate to have several skilled and experienced Permaculture designers, and Permaculture Institutes to help us, in Rob Hopkins words, to work on “re-skilling” our community, and developing the “resiliency” that Hopkins speaks about in his Handbook.
Our core group will be having our first formal meeting within the next two weeks. We are following the template laid out in Rob Hopkins excellent manual, though I think there will be many challenges to adopting that manual to the unique culture and environment of the Central Coast. We have acquired the domain names for our local group and Transition town board members Roy Prince and Cat Henley will be helping us establish a website - work has already begun on that site [http://www.transitiontownsantabarbara.org ].
I hope as other groups gets established throughout the Central Coast that we can all use the new Transition Town listserv that you have established to work together to build this movement throughout the region.
I hope that as word spreads that many in the environmental and social justice movements will join us in this effort. Between Peak Oil and Climate Change, we face the greatest environmental and social justice crisis in the history of Homo Sapiens, and failure to act may soon place Homo Sapiens on the growing list of endangered species - despite how many of us now exist on the planet.
Several years ago Linda Buzzell and I participated with as fellows of For The Future [http://www.forthefuture.org ], a local think tank, and HopeDance in bringing the first conference to Santa Barbara on the subject of peak oil. The conference keynote speaker was Richard Heinberg (thanks to Bob Banner and HopeDance). It was staged at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was a huge success. At the time we were searching for a grass roots, non-establishment way of mobilizing the community to follow up. We were both flabbergasted when we read The Transition Handbook, and saw that Rob Hopkins had successfully acted upon a similar vision, and had used Permaculture design principles to develop an entire methodology for how to organize a community so that community could lead itself to sustainability. It will be nice not to have to re-invent the wheel. We only have to tweak Rob Hopkins vision to meet our unique local needs. I hope many join us in the effort.
Larry can be reached at lbsaltzman@aol.com .
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