Reviews
Transition Town Totnes Energy Descent Plan now available!
Transition Leicester - May 20, 2010
by Andrew Reeves
One of the main aims of every Transition initiative is to develop a plan B for their area – a plan of action for shifting from our reliance on fossil fuels for energy towards a desirable, vibrant, low-carbon future. The first UK Transition initiative, Transition Town Totnes, has just released it’s Energy Descent Plan, which you can check out online or in book form. More info below…
Transition in Action: Totnes and District 2030: an Energy Descent Action Plan: available now!
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Transition Town Totnes have just released their Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP). It was recently described by the Chair of Totnes Chamber of Commerce as “the single most important book about Totnes ever published”. It is already turning out to have an impact far beyond that. The EDAP is a comprehensive, lively and colourful community-based guide to reducing local dependence on fossil fuels and reducing the community’s carbon footprint over the next 20 years, a period during which the changes associated with declining oil supplies and the impacts of climate change are anticipated to become more apparent.
Running to over 300 pages and printed in full colour, it also includes some detailed research, such as ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ and a full Energy Budget for the area. It opens with a detailed oral history of Totnes in the 1950s, asking what lessons from an energy constrained future can be learnt from an energy constrained past. Packed with humour, imagination and ideas, the Totnes EDAP is the perfect antidote to environmental gloom and doom, showing that peak oil, climate change and the bursting of the debt bubble need not be seen as a crisis, rather as a huge opportunity for entrepreneurship, creativity, community, enhanced resilience and a greater quality of life.
The EDAP was developed by Transition Town Totnes and the community of Totnes and District, a busy market town and its fifteen encircling parishes. Its creation engaged the community in a 20-month process of visioning, backcasting, brainstorming and designing a community pathway to resilience and relocalisation. At the heart of the EDAP are 15 sections covering key sustainability topics from food production to governance. As the world’s first EDAP, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the Transition approach, and in proactive, solutions-focused responses to environmental challenges. You can preview the Totnes EDAP here, and order copies here.
Read the original review on TransitionLeicester.com.
October 2010
The Transition Totnes Energy Descent Plan.
By Michelle Colussi.
The Transition Town model is a series of steps or ingredients for engaging a whole community in the process of reducing reliance on fossil fuels. The model assumes that life with less oil is inevitable, and that making the changes required is up to us – to you and me. It also assumes that everyone needs to be part of the solution. Residents of Totnes, England first developed the model in about 2005. Today, close to 500 communities around the world have adopted it and are recognized as “Transition Towns.” An international Transition Network has formed to connect these initiatives and support training related to the model.
You might say that the purpose of Transition Towns is to build a community’s awareness, knowledge, engagement, relationships, and tools such that it can complete a multi-sector, comprehensive Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) and have the capacity to implement it. The EDAP presents a long-term vision of life with less oil in major sectors of community life, and then identifies the incremental steps required to get there.
Since I started delivering Training for Transition workshops in 2009, participants have had questions about the EDAP. They want to know:
* What does the plan include? What components will support the efforts of citizens, organizations, and institutions to reduce carbon emissions and reliance on oil?
* When is the right time to start? How do we know when we are ready?
* How do we start? What do we do so every sector in our community helps imagine a way of life with less fossil fuels and the steps to making that vision a reality?
This spring, Totnes published their EDAP: Transition in Action - Totnes and District 2030, an energy descent action plan. Running at over 200 pages, it sheds some light on these questions. If your Transition Town is wondering how to organize and carry out an EDAP process of its own, Transition in Action is a great place to start.
When Did They Start and Finish?
The members of Transition Totnes started to plan their EDAP process in early 2008, about two years after formally launching (or “unleashing”) their initiative. The EDAP process was announced publicly that September. In April 2009 a university conducted an extensive survey of 220 households to support the planning process and to provide some baseline data. They had a full time co-ordinator organizing a wide variety of events that engaged about 500 people in the EDAP process.
In short, the EDAP process in Totnes took about two years, and commenced about two years after Transition Totnes was officially announced. Sandpoint, Idaho, one of the first Transition Towns in the U.S., is showing about the same rate of progress. The people of Sandpoint are just now starting to plan the EDAP process, about two years after their unleashing. Transition in Action does not actually define “readiness” anywhere that I could find. But reading between the lines, I detect the following:
* If you have solid Working Groups, in major sectors, with a bit of success behind them …
* If your core group functions well and likewise has some stability and success …
* If you have some likelihood of getting paid staff to manage the process …
* and if you have some positive partnerships and relationships with other key organizations and government …
Read the full original article online here.
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