First German Transition Town Initiative in Berlin

Stefa and Lars from Art-Ecology-Education just tipped me about the first German Transition Town initiative, that has started in Berlin Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Transition Towns are a practical, bottom up answer to the question: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?

The Transition Town Movement origins in the UK, where initiatives are spreading all over, and where Summerset is the first municipality to recognize the aims and success of the work of the Transition Town initiative and started cooperating actively with the group. Meanwhile, about 600 initiatives around the world are preparing their local communities to become Transition Towns.

On a local level, a group of people within a community starts an Transition Initiative, raises awareness on the topic around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a community lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon emissions. After a stage of awareness raising, the group connects with other initiatives, starts to organize projects on energy, transport, economics; and builds bridges with the local community and government.

The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, is being translated in German, will be out in October, and might give an impulse to a transition movement in Germany.

From the book:

“We live in an oil-dependent world, and have got to this level of dependency in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process – without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful. Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive outcome. These changes can lead to the rebirth of local communities, which will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and build their own houses using local materials. They can also encourage the development of local currencies, to keep money in the local area.”

While the ideas of the Transition Town movement are pretty interesting, and grassroots movements will play a decicive role in solving our current problems, the “looks” of the movement stays too much in the old eco-hippy style to really reach out to a larger public. So hopefully the movement will find a way in both being forward and sexy…