TRANSITION EPSOM - a talk by Alex Payne from our inaugural meeting

“To save the planet, we do not need miraculous technical breakthroughs or vast amounts of capital. Essentially we need a radical change in our thinking and behaviour.” Ted Trainer ‘Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society’.

The Task
We’re here today to ask for your help in building a Transition Town Initiative in Epsom. The Transition Town movement makes four assumptions:
1. That it’s inevitable that we will have to live with dramatically lower energy consumption and it’s better to plan for this than to be taken by surprise
2. That our communities currently lack the resilience to cope with the effects of peak oil
3. That we have to act collectively and we have to act now
4. That by utilising the collective creativity that exists already in our communities we can proactively design our energy descent so that we build ways of living that are more connected and enriching and also recognise the biological limits of the planet.

There are two challenges:
CLIMATE CHANGE: Coping as a community with a changing climate and not making climate change worse than it already is.
PEAK OIL: Coping as a community with a decline in the availability and an increase in the price of fossil fuels.

Preparing for the future
Given climate change and peak oil, how can our community prepare? Epsom needs to become a self-reliant, resilient community. The decline in the availability of fossil fuels and their rising price will inevitably lead to the local scale becoming more important. We need to be able to produce locally as much as we can.
How do we go about this? One of the most successful tools other transition town initiatives have used is what they call visioning, imagining what the future might look like and from this comes a list of projects that might be suitable places to start to make the change.

The following ideas have come from the current members of the Transition Epsom group. Some of these projects already exist in Epsom and it’s about making relationships with existing groups and raising awareness of them locally. Other ideas for projects are ones that already exist in other transition towns, such as Totnes, Lewes and Kinsale.

These projects cover every aspect of life: economy, food, housing, transport and waste. Fundamental to its success is also to foster community. This is not about individual households trying to be self-sufficient, but about a community working together towards a resilient future.

• A revitalised local economy
  “A future with a revitalised local economy would have many advantages over the present, including a happier and less stressed population and increased stability”
  Initiatives could be set up to include forming local businesses: a fair trade cafe, a local brewery, a local bakery, a food co-operative, perhaps with local bike delivery or using a van powered by biodiesel from recycled cooking oil. A simple project might be the creating of a local food directory so that people could support producers. Epsom could have its own local currency (Totnes created the Totnes pound to be spent in local shops), bank and credit union. There is an existing LETS (Local Exchange Trading Scheme).
• Re-skilling for resilience
  Re-skilling is key to making a community more resilient. Projects that teach the old skills: food growing, cooking, mending, carpentry are fundamental. Permaculture trainings so that people learn to work with nature rather than against it could also be run for Epsom residents.
• More locally produced food
  Using public spaces for growing food (for example, nut tree planting), working together to produce food through seed swaps and garden share projects, auditing local fruit trees, fruit tree harvesting and juice pressing, encouraging chicken, rabbit and bee keeping through projects and societies.
• Preparing for a simpler life
  Projects that encourage a change to a simpler life might include for example, a voluntary simplicity support group and also things such as slow food feasts and ‘food for free’ walks.
• Recycling
  Projects could include setting up an Epsom and Ewell Freecycle, running a scrapstore that takes paper waste from local businesses for use by schools for creative projects, make do and mend groups.
• Homes and housing
  Projects could include a competition where households vie to reduce their carbon footprint, a co-operative home scheme for older people, LETS and skill swaps so that people can help each other to maintain their homes.
• Transport
  Projects that focus on encouraging people out of their cars such as a walking bus, community transport schemes, community bike programmes
• Fostering a sense of community
  Projects might include the setting up of a knitting and darning circle, spinning and weaving groups, allotment art projects, vegetable growing competitions, an “ethical man” competition !

We invite you all to both add to this list and also think about whether you can contribute to getting some of these projects up and running.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.” Arundhati Roy

This talk can also be downloaded in Word format

If you are interested in joining our initiating group please email us at info@transitionepsom.org.uk

We also have a social network site at transitionepsom.ning.com - there is a discussion forum, events listing and many more resources